Weird error when using VI on FreeBSD-4.x

[Stephen McKay]

On Monday, 22nd September 2003, Forrest Aldrich wrote:

>I'm getting this error from time-to-time when using VI under 
>FreeBSD_4.9-prerelease:
>
>Error: input: Resource temporarily unavailable
>
>Basically, VI just exits/crashes (no core dump).
>
>The load average is pretty low:
>
>4:18PM  up 10 days, 23:42, 4 users, load averages: 0.13, 0.21, 0.21
>
>And I don't seem to have any other problems with the system.
>
>Wondering what this might be, or if it's a known problem, etc.

It's sort-of known.  It's been around for a while now, but nobody knows
how to fix it.  I've seen it since I upgraded to 4.8 (from 4.5).

As far as I can tell, *sometimes* a read from a pty returns EAGAIN when
it shouldn't.  This has happened to me with /bin/cat of stdin (which
was a pty in xterm), so it's nothing to do with VI as such.

Stephen.