Item1677: RCS may leave stale semaphone files after crash

Received the following error:

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RCS: /usr/bin/rcs  -l %FILENAME|F% failed: 

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Determined that the error notice was due to a orphaned semaphore file, as mentioned in the RCS man file as a "BUG":

A catastrophe (e.g. a system crash) can cause RCS to leave behind a semaphore file that causes later invocations of RCS to claim that the RCS file is in use. To fix this, remove the semaphore file. A semaphore file's name typically begins with , or ends with _.

Indeed, I found that a semaphore file existed in the data folder for this web, and deleting it corrected the problem.

RcsWrap.pm should probably be enhanced to try to delete a left-over semaphore file since this is a known problem, or as a weaker alternative, add a more elaborate description to the error message to point out that deleting the semaphore file can correct the problem.

Will add an option to a utility program to scan data files and delete stale semaphores as an option.

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Raymond hasn't produced this utility yet, and TBH I'm not sure of the value; it's easy enough to find such semaphore files and delete them manually.

I don't think a core code fix is appropriate here; this is a very rare error.Addressed by Support.Faq28

-- CrawfordCurrie - 25 Jun 2010