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User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i586; en-US; rv:0.9.9) Gecko/20020513

Description of problem:
In tracking down some hardware problems with an SMP system, we came up with this
very simple test.

    while [ 1 ] ; do date ; done | uniq -c

I would expect that on an otherwise idle machine the date command can be run
roughly the same number of times per second over long periods of time. But we
see a trend over a few minutes where fewer and fewer instances are run. 
Sometimes this leads to that shell crashing.

I posted this to the bash-bug list and got the following reply:

  Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2002 10:10:32 -0400
  From: Chet Ramey <chet@nike.ins.cwru.edu>
  Reply-To: chet@po.cwru.edu
  To: jwright@penguincomputing.com
  Cc: bug-bash@gnu.org, jwright@penguincomputing.com, chet@po.cwru.edu
  Subject: Re: odd behavior of while loop, leading to crash

  It's a race condition.  There is a fix in bash-2.05b.


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
bash-2.05-8

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.as above

Additional info: