Re: Re: What is responsible for a

Actually, this idea that it might be caused by strange Win32 characters staying in the file might be right. I'm running the script on FreeBSD 4.1.1 with Apache, but I do most of the editing on a Win98 machine using Homesite. I don't ftp the script to the BSD box, because I have Samba running on it, and so access the box through a share.

The error is definitely with the script, not with another executable.

The #! line is:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
and using Perl 5.

Comment on Re: Re: What is responsible for a

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Re: Re: Re: What is responsible for a by Fastolfe (Vicar) on Dec 15, 2000 at 20:30 UTC
Both of you share this theory, so I suppose it isn't groundless, but it is inconsistent with the nature of the error message itself. The message "Text file busy" is a system error message given exceedingly rarely and under very specific circumstances. He was running Linux, you're running FreeBSD, so it's unlikely an OS thing or a filesystem thing. "Perl 5" doesn't help nail down a common version there (5.00503? 5.004? 5.6.0?). Try doing what he did when you get this error message. Try just copying the file to a new name and copying it back (using a simple 'cp'). If the problem goes away, it's very unlikely that it has anything to do with the content. If it doesn't fix it, then it could possibly be content-related. So if we eliminate the OS, eliminate the filesystem (by eliminating the OS), and eliminate the content, the only thing left is the "way" that the file was saved or a bug with Perl. We'd need to do more investigating. If you have 'strace' or 'truss' on your system, I would be very interested to see precisely what syscall is involved in that error message. If it's acting on a file descriptor, back-track until you can find the open statement involved.	[reply]

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Re: Re: Re: What is responsible for a
by Fastolfe (Vicar) on Dec 15, 2000 at 20:30 UTC

He was running Linux, you're running FreeBSD, so it's unlikely an OS thing or a filesystem thing. "Perl 5" doesn't help nail down a common version there (5.00503? 5.004? 5.6.0?).

Try doing what he did when you get this error message. Try just copying the file to a new name and copying it back (using a simple 'cp'). If the problem goes away, it's very unlikely that it has anything to do with the content. If it doesn't fix it, then it could possibly be content-related.

So if we eliminate the OS, eliminate the filesystem (by eliminating the OS), and eliminate the content, the only thing left is the "way" that the file was saved or a bug with Perl. We'd need to do more investigating.

If you have 'strace' or 'truss' on your system, I would be very interested to see precisely what syscall is involved in that error message. If it's acting on a file descriptor, back-track until you can find the open statement involved.

[reply]