emacs hangs when a sub-process goes defunct

[Ken Brown]

On 12/6/2012 9:08 AM, Jonas J Linde wrote:
> Hello!
>
> And Ken Brown spoke unto the world. And said:
>> On 11/14/2012 11:07 AM, Rockefeller, Harry wrote:
>>> Emacs often hangs when I save a buffer which is also tied to an svn repository.
>>> When I run ps I see the emacs child process 'svn' <defunct>.
>>> I just had a very similar situation while running ediffs. But this time emacs hung up
>>> with the child process 'diff' <defunct>.
>>
>> When you say the buffer is tied to an svn repository, do you mean
>> you're using emacs as your commit editor as in the following report?
>>
>>   http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2012-10/msg00375.html
>
> That report is about how emacs crashes when hitting Ctrl-G. This report
> is about how emacs doesn't crash but hangs apparently waiting for a
> defunct child process.
>
> I've recently (since a few weeks) started to experience this same
> problem several times per day. The only option I have found is to send a
> SIGKILL to emacs and start over.

Can you think of anything that's changed in the last few week?

> It happens when running for example cleartool in a sub shell or when
> saving files over ssh or scp with tramp. When doing a 'ps -ef' I always
> find a <defunct> child process of emacs - eg.:
>
>     liejj    4968    7748 ?        14:30:47 /usr/bin/cygpath <defunct>
>     liejj    7748       1 pty1     11:33:32 /usr/bin/emacs-X11
> or
>     liejj    5064    3976 pty1     10:10:20 /usr/bin/emacs-X11
>     liejj    2024    5064 pty11    10:28:56 /usr/bin/ssh
>     liejj    6300    5064 ?        11:30:58 /cygdrive/c/Program Files/IBM/RationalSDLC/ClearCase/bin/cleartool <defunct>
>
>> If so, it's a bug in emacs-24.2 that has been fixed upstream for
>> emacs-24.3.  If not, more details would be helpful.
>
> I'll attach the cygcheck output. Is there anything else I should do?

Your cygcheck output shows multiple cygwin1.dlls in your path.  The 
first thing you should do is fix that.

If that doesn't solve the problem, please try the recently released 
(test version) emacs-24.2.90-1.  And be sue to read the release 
announcement, because there have been some changes:

   http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2012-12/msg00004.html

If that doesn't help either, try to come up with a simple recipe for 
reproducing the problem that doesn't require the use of non-Cygwin 
programs like cleartool.

Ken

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