fatrace crashes with 'too many open files'

[Chris Billington]

I'm on Arch Linux with fatrace 0.15.1

Running it as `fatrace -f W` works, but after some time fatrace exits with the error "too many open files". For me this occurs after about a minute and 30 seconds. This is on a headless server that isn't doing much - looks like the samba daemon is writing a file every 20 seconds, and there are some logged failed ssh logins and fail2ban logging about banning them.

$ time sudo fatrace -f W
nmbd(861): CW /var/lib/samba/wins.dat.861
nmbd(862): CW /var/lib/samba/wins.dat
sshd(863): CWO /var/log/btmp
fail2ban-server(391): W /var/log/fail2ban.log
sshd(863): CW /var/log/btmp
fail2ban-server(391): W /var/log/fail2ban.log
nmbd(865): CW /var/lib/samba/wins.dat
nmbd(866): CW /var/lib/samba/wins.dat
sshd(867): W /var/log/tallylog
sshd(867): CW /var/log/tallylog
sshd(867): CWO /var/log/btmp
fail2ban-server(391): W /var/log/fail2ban.log
sshd(867): RW /var/log/tallylog
sshd(867): CW /var/log/tallylog
sshd(867): CW /var/log/btmp
fail2ban-server(391): W /var/log/fail2ban.log
nmbd(869): CW /var/lib/samba/wins.dat
sshd(867): W /var/log/tallylog
sshd(867): CW /var/log/tallylog
sshd(867): CW /var/log/btmp
fail2ban-server(391): W /var/log/fail2ban.log
fatrace: read: Too many open files

[Stefan Dotterweich (stefandtw)]

I had the same problem on a 4.19 kernel.

The attached patch seems to fix the issue.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Thanks! I applied the patch, this makes perfect sense. I'll do a 0.16.3 release now. Sorry for letting this slip through the cracks!

https://github.com/martinpitt/fatrace/commit/96396d62a90