[error] (26)Text file busy

johns has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Apache (Unix) log file reports the following error: error (26)Text file busy: exec of /virtuals/htdocs/cgi-bin/1.pl failed This error does not always occur (1 in ~6 runs). Can anyone tell me why this error happens please? The perl code, 1.pl, sorts a directory listing (demo) every 25s and is:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use warnings; use strict;

my ($logdir) = '../demo';

opendir LOGDIR, $logdir or die "Cannot open $logdir: $!";

my @fileList = grep !/^\./, readdir(LOGDIR); closedir LOGDIR;

my @unsorted = map { [ $_, (stat "$logdir/$_")[7,9] ] } @fileList;
my @sorted = sort { $a->[2] <=> $b->[2] } @unsorted;

print "content-type:text/html\n\n";

print <<"HTML code";

<html>
<head>
<META HTTP-EQUIV=REFRESH CONTENT="25"> 

<title></title>
</head>

<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF">

<center>

<a href="2.pl?image=$sorted[-2][0]">$sorted[-2][0]<br></a>
</p>

    <table width="100%">
        <tr>
          <td align="center" bgcolor="#CCCCFF">
                <p class="small">
                <font size="2">Some Text</font>
                 </p>
            </td>
        </tr>
    </table>    
  </center>    
</body>

HTML code
1;
[download]

Comment on [error] (26)Text file busy Download Code

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Re: [error] (26)Text file busy by Anonymous Monk on Apr 22, 2009 at 21:50 UTC
I had the same arror but under different circumstances. My script would work fine on the CLI but in a browswer it would fail with a blank page. The entire response was empty, the server would simply close the connection. I was editing the scripts on my local machine and then FTPing the files to the server. Restarting the FTP service on the remote box solved it for me.	[reply]
Re^2: [error] (26)Text file busy by Anonymous Monk on Feb 16, 2013 at 21:02 UTC
thank you it works. ps aux to see which are FTP processes kill process_number of FTP server then reconnect...	[reply]
Re: [error] (26)Text file busy by ikegami (Patriarch) on Apr 23, 2009 at 00:02 UTC
That error comes from the OS. `$ perl -wle'$!=26; print $!' Text file busy` [download] From `man 2 execve`, ETXTBSY Executable was open for writing by one or more processes.	[reply] [d/l] [select]