Re: job control problem

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

} > } Bash-4.2 will sleep for 1, 2, 4, then 8 seconds if a fork fails, trying
} > } after each sleep to reap dead children.
} > 
} > Hmm, that seems like it could be a problem in some rare cases.
} 
} What rare cases were you thinking of?

Any in which the shell is itself fork-bombing the system.  Sure, you can
always work out a way to do so intentionally, but the shell retrying on
failure would seem to make it way too easy to do it accidentally.