t7006 sometimes hangs in cronjobs on OS X

Hi *,

I have been running a nightly next&pu smoke tester each on RHEL5 and OS X. For quite some time (at least a month), t7006 gets stuck randomly (i.e., not every night). [This has been a bit of a problem because it keeps a lot of processes stuck on the machine and eats into my ulimit, but that's the case with any stuck process; I'll have to think about a good solution to that.]

The relevant part of 'ps xwww' is

  65211   ??  SN     0:00.03 /bin/sh t7006-pager.sh
  65798   ??  SN     0:00.04 /usr/bin/perl /Users/trast/git-smoke/t/test-terminal.perl git --no-pager log
  65846   ??  ZN     0:00.00 (git)
  65847   ??  ZN     0:00.00 (perl5.10.0)

Everything runs from a cronjob, so it does not have a terminal. If I SIGTERM the first perl process, the script continues and I eventually get the normal results (upload to smoke.nix.git.is and emailed report).

The Cc list is a bit of a random guess based on who worked on this; from the 'git --no-pager log' you can see that the test got stuck in the 'no pager with --no-pager' test, but that was introduced 10 months ago. It may very well have been broken all the time, or also for other commands.

So if you have any idea what the problem could be or what I should be looking for, help would be much appreciated...

Some files that may be relevant:

Crontab entry: 0 5 * * * cd ~ && . .bashrc && ./do-the-smoke.sh

---- 8< ---- ~/do-the-smoke.sh ---- 8< ---- #!/bin/bash

cd ~/git-smoke git fetch -q

doit () {
    branch="$1"
    git checkout origin/"$branch" || exit 1

    make -j12 || exit 1
    cd t
    make clean
    TEST_JOBS=6 nice make smoke
    TEST_JOBS=6 nice make smoke_report SMOKE_COMMENT="Darwin 10.5 $branch" SMOKE_TAGS="$branch, Darwin 10.5, NO_SVN_TESTS, NO_EXPAT"
}

( doit next ) ( doit pu ) ---- >8 ---- >8 ----

---- 8< ---- ~/git-smoke/config.mak ---- 8< ---- CFLAGS = -Wall -O3 -g THREADED_DELTA_SEARCH = 1 NO_SVN_TESTS = 1 ASCIIDOC8 = 1 ASCIIDOC_NO_ROFF = 1 GNU_ROFF = 1 BLK_SHA1 = 1 prefix = /home/thomas/.local NO_EXPAT = 1 NO_GETTEXT = 1 SMOKE_USERNAME = trast SMOKE_PASSWORD = I'm not telling you :-) SMOKE_COMMENT = RHEL5.5 ---- >8 ---- >8 ----

(I just noticed that the above 'prefix' makes no sense because $HOME is /Users/trast, but I'm not installing it anyway...)