SUMMARY: GDB vs Solaris 2.4

From: Jody L. Baze (jody@blueskytours.com)
Date: Thu Jan 18 1996 - 18:00:36 CST


Hi again - summary time!

Original problem: gdb would poop out when trying to run a program, usually
with the message "/proc/xxxx: cannot open proc file" or "/proc/xxxx:
Resource temporarily unavailable". Defunct processes would indeed be
spawned, but the debugger stubornly refused to do anything else
worthwhile. Although things worked fine on a SS5, this behaviour was
observed on a SS4 and a SS10, all running Solaris 2.4. Su'ing to root
caused the problem to go away, but this is certainly not a great
alternative. :^)

Well, the problem is solved and many thanks go out to:

  Ric Anderson (ric@rtd.com)
  Martin Huber (hu@garfield.m.eunet.de)
  Tony Jago (tony@fit.qut.edu.au)
  Matthew Stier (matthew.stier@imonics.com)

Tony hit the nail on the head here: gdb must have read permission for
itself, the executable being debugged, *AND THE SHELL*. It's the shell
part that got me - I use bash, which seems to install itself with mode
751. A quick change to 755 and all is well! I'm not sure of the
ramifications of this - but I will point out that /bin/sh and /bin/csh
both are world readable. Thus, I don't think the solution should open any
security holes or the like. If somebody would care to expound on this, I'm
all ears...

Other suggestions included the need to have the SHELL environment variable
set (AFAIK, bash does this automagically) and that set[ug]id programs
sometimes cause this behaviour.

Everybody involved had great suggestions - your help is very much
appreciated. Thanks a bunch!

JLB

--
Jody L. Baze                 Blue Sky Tours, Inc.
Software Development         10832 Prospect Avenue N.E.
System Administration        Albuquerque, NM  87112
jody@BlueSkyTours.COM        (505) 292-6961



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:10:51 CDT