Field guide to command line failures · reference only, nothing hosted here
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EAGAIN and fork failures.

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EAGAIN on a shell usually means fork failed

The process table, a file descriptor limit, or memory ran out at the moment of the call.

Check the process ceiling

ulimit -u cat /proc/sys/kernel/threads-max cat /proc/sys/kernel/pid_max

Check descriptors for this shell

ulimit -n ls /proc/$$/fd | wc -l

Find the leak

ls /proc/*/fd 2>/dev/null | wc -l for p in /proc/[0-9]*; do echo "$(ls $p/fd 2>/dev/null | wc -l) $p"; done | sort -rn | head

Scope: failure mode: EAGAIN and fork failures.

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