Possible Mac OS X file handle leak when bulk decoding with gnus...

[Ken Coleman]

Hi everyone,

I'm completely unsure if this is a bug in emacs or a bug in gnus, but I 
am definitely having a problem.  Basically I'm reading a binary 
newsgroup, selecting a ton of articles (C-x h) for processing (#), then 
trying to uudecode and save them (X U) to a folder, honoring multi-part 
binaries, etc.  It works for a while, but eventually I get the 
following error:

Debugger entered--Lisp error: (file-error "Creating pipe" "too many 
open files")
  start-process("*uudecode*" #<buffer  *Gnus UU Output*> "/bin/bash" 
"-c" "cd /tmp/gnus748Nbm/ ; uudecode")
  gnus-uu-uustrip-article(" *Original Article*" middle)
  gnus-uu-grab-articles( ...) gnus-uu-uustrip-article t)
  gnus-uu-decode-with-method(gnus-uu-uustrip-article nil "~/News/" nil 
nil t)
  gnus-uu-decode-uu-and-save(nil "~/News/")
  call-interactively(gnus-uu-decode-uu-and-save)

I am using a recent gnus from cvs and a recent emacs from cvs (both in 
the past week or so), so I expect that completely up-to-date versions 
would exhibit this behavior as well.  I'm not using "Carbon" emacs, but 
the x11 version for Mac OS X (--with-x --without-carbon).  I've also 
tried the (setq process-connection-type nil), but it doesn't work - I 
also shouldn't need it according to what I've read since I'm running 
10.3.

Also, I am a software developer, but I am not an emacs expert by any 
means.  It seems that in order to find the bug I'd have to debug both 
the elisp code and the emacs binary itself, something which I've never 
done before.  It appears that it'd be pretty straightforward according 
to http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/DebugEmacs but what functions 
am I likely to need to debug through?  Stuff in process.c?

Thanks in advance for any help/pointers!
- Ken.
address@hidden