8.1.2 "Could not launch" message: race condition at startup

Question

(apologies for the cross-post; someone suggested that I post this in the Unix forum, so here it is -- I suppose it would have made sense to do this in the first place, I mustn't have been concentrating :-)
Hi,
I've recently upgraded our Sun Ray servers to Adobe Reader 8.1.2, and now every so often when browsing to a pdf document, Firefox says
"Could not launch Adobe Reader 8.1.2. Please make sure it exists in your PATH [...]"
This seems to be caused by a race condition at startup. The browser plugin runs "/bin/acroread -version", which simply echoes the version number and exits. When it's working, this happens:
25436: write(1, " 8 . 1 . 2\n", 6) = 6
25348/1: read(56, " 8 . 1 . 2\n", 20) = 6
25436: _exit(0)
25348/1: close(56) = 0
i.e. the string is written by the script and immediately read by the browser.
However, occasionally this happens:
23119: write(1, " 8 . 1 . 2\n", 6) = 6
23119: _exit(0)
23008/1: Received signal #18, SIGCLD, in read() [caught]
23008/1: siginfo: SIGCLD CLD_EXITED pid=23119 status=0x0000
23008/1: read(58, 0xFFBFB5C0, 20) Err#4 EINTR
i.e. the read() call is interrupted by the SIGCLD generated by the exiting /bin/acroread process.
I've inserted a "sleep 5" after line 11 of the /bin/acroread script to try to alleviate this, but I haven't tested it fully.

Answer 1

Hello Ian,
Thanks for reporting this. We will try to address this issue in the next release as you have stated a valid race condition issue (though it's difficult to reproduce).
Gaurav