Re: libtoolize 2.2.7a is a fork bomb under OpenSolaris

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Vadim,

* Vadim Zeitlin wrote on Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 06:20:42PM CET:
>  This is another bug report about latest git version of libtool under
> OpenSolaris. Running libtoolize from this version seems to spawn an endless
> number of libtoolize and gsed processes. I don't have much details about
> the bug because I really don't want to try it again after rebooting the
> machine twice (it brings my poor VM to its knees pretty quickly) but it's
> probably due to re-exec logic in the beginning of the script. All I can say
> is that it creates plenty of conf*.sh files and that it happens even if I
> just do "libtoolize --help" and that running "libtoolize --debug" is not
> helpful because there is a huge amount of output from all the copies of
> itself that it launches all scrambled together. I'd be willing to debug it
> more if I could just find some way to do it safely (i.e. without rebooting
> every time) but I don't know how to do it and I don't see anything
> obviously wrong in (convoluted) shell code in the script so unfortunately I
> can't help further with this bug.

Thanks for the report.  Which autoconf version are you using?

I would like to ask a few more questions, but addressing them might
require you to reboot a couple more times, so please judge for yourself.

Can you work around this issue by something like
  CONFIG_SHELL=/bin/bash
  export CONFIG_SHELL

(adjust path to bash if necessary) and then using
  $CONFIG_SHELL ./libtoolize ...

?

Can you try to catch a (partial) trace log of your fork bomb by adding
  set -x
as second line in the libtoolize script, and, without above CONFIG_SHELL
setting, maybe running something like
  ./libtoolize 2>&1 | sed 300q

so that subsequent re-spawns should die from the SIGPIPE?

Thanks,
Ralf