Cygwin Notes - cygwin

Sean B. Palmer
2005-02-03T03:13:45Z

Random notes about cygwin are starting to be collected here, including tips about what to do when it all goes horribly wrong (i.e. runs out of PIDs), and how to configure it in general.

Cygwin Notes

Cygwin has some odd foibles and niceities, and this page tracks some of them.

Process ID Shortage

Cygwin does some weird stuff sometimes. For example I keep running into this problem and not being able to find the solution easily:

676102803 [main] zsh 840377 fork_copy: user/cygwin data
   pass 2 failed, 0x970000..0xAF3000, done 0, windows
   pid 4294640815, Win32 error 8
withcd: fork failed: resource temporarily unavailable

This is due to it running out of PIDs. I noted the problem and solution on Swhack; basically you have to run "rebaseall", but that means closing down all of your current processes and actually running it in bash which is somewhat irritating. If anyone has a better solution, I'd be glad if they could let me know. Thanks.

Startup

I don't use a cygwin.bat file, just a Windows shortcut containing the following:

rxvt -sl 10000 -fg lightgray -bg black
   -tn xterm -e ssh-agent /bin/zsh --login -i

This works nicely with /bin/zsh from the cygwin package, whereas my /usr/local/bin/zsh was giving "zsh: fork failed: permission denied" in the homedir all the time for some reason.

The shell then uses my .shellrc on initialization.

Sean B. Palmer