Intermittently, launching emacs in background exits bash

[J. Scott Berg]

Very rarely (once a month or so), I will launch emacs with "emacs filename &", and not only will emacs not appear, gnome-terminal will close as well, presumably because bash exited. Normally it works fine, it is just on rare occasions that this happens. Since I've never seen another report of this behavior, I'm assuming that it must somehow be related to my bash settings; the only relevant deviation from the Ubuntu stock .bashrc is:

unset HISTFILE
bld=`/usr/bin/tput bold`
sgr=`/usr/bin/tput sgr0`
tty=`/usr/bin/tty | /bin/sed s%/dev/%%`
export PS1='\['$bld'\](\!) '$tty' [\j jobs] [rc=$?] \u@\h \d \@\['$sgr'\]\n\['$bld'\]\w\['$sgr'\]\n\['$bld'\]\$\['$sgr'\] '
unset bld sgr tty
set -b

I've never seen this happen with another program, so it seems to be some bizarre interaction between emacs and bash. I'm running Gutsy, but this is a long-standing bug, I've even seen it outside of Ubuntu (always the combination gnome-terminal/bash/emacs).

[era (era)]

On Wed, 23 Jan 2008 15:10:58 -0000, "J. Scott Berg" <email address hidden>
said:
> Very rarely (once a month or so), I will launch emacs with "emacs
> filename &", and not only will emacs not appear, gnome-terminal will
> close as well, presumably because bash exited.

Do you see anything in your .xsession-errors when this happens?

/* era */

--
If this were a real .signature, it would suck less. Well, maybe not.

[J. Scott Berg (jsberg)]

Good question, I don't know (unfortunately the .xsession-errors from the session where it died is gone). It never occurred to me to check since I've always assumed it was some tricky job control race in bash. I will check next time and post here.

[era (era)]

Marking as "incomplete" while waiting for word on the .xsession-errors issue.

[J. Scott Berg (jsberg)]

Nothing in .xsession-errors or Xorg.0.log

[era (era)]

Perhaps you could create a wrapper /home/you/bin/emacs to add some debugging information. Here's a quick stab at something ...

#!/bin/sh -vx
# doubtful whether the -vx adds more noise than useful information
# FIXME: insecure temp files
exec /usr/bin/emacs "$@" >/tmp/emacs.$$.out 2>/tmp/emacs.$$.err

[Mika Fischer (zoop)]

Scott,

did you get a chance to try era's suggestion? It could really help us figure out what's going on since nobody seems to be able to reproduce this bug.

Regards,
 Mika

[J. Scott Berg (jsberg)]

I tried what I thought would be a variation on it, which was to set gnome-terminal not to close when the shell exits. I didn't see anything for a while, then just a couple days ago I had a shell just go dead on me, as if I had exited it. I believe I backgrounded something just before that, but I'm not sure. No message in the terminal, nothing in .xsession-errors or Xorg.0.log. There was an emacs and another GUI program (grace) running in the background. I'm not sure if they were still running. I figured I just typed control-D accidentally, so I just closed the gnome-terminal window. As soon as I did that, both of the children (emacs and grace) died with it (If I had expected this I would have checked the other windows out first...)! So I'm guessing that this was the same phenomenon, and it's looking shell related. Maybe the "set -b"? I associated it with emacs probably because 90% of the times I background something it is emacs.

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

Since you said it doesn't seem to be an emacs issue, I'm closing that task.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for bash (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]