Fork Problem with Cygwin

December 18, 2003

OpenSSH runs in Windows via a port using Cygwin ("a Linux-like environment for Windows"). It has full SSH capabilities, including key management and server operation (yes, that means you can SSH into your Windows box!). Today I tried to load the ssh-agent at the command line (cmd.exe) and got an obnoxious response: fork: permission denied.

I found the following answer, which isn't cygwin or Windows specific (though the low limit might be):

Fork wont run if you run out of processes per that user.

I was running Outlook, Dreamweaver MX, Photoshop 3 (yes, v3!), and SETI@Home as well as the command line. I didn't need Photoshop at the moment, so I decided to close it and see what happens. Sure enough, the forking problem went away.

Now surely there is some way to avoid this problem in the future? There must be some means of increasing the number of processes available? I've certainly run Cygwin commands with more applications open in Windows before. Let me know if you have a solution; I'll update the post if I find anything.