[gentoo-user] trouble starting bash

[David Relson <relson@osagesoftware.com>]

Greetings,

This morning, all of the sudden, I'm encountering process creation
problems.  The problems seem to affect only bash.  There are no problems
starting X applications like firefox and open office.

FWIW, my usual "update world" was done yesterday (and emerged the
packages listed at the end of this message). 

Anybody have suggestions regarding the symptoms given below?

Regards,

David

### symptoms ###

Attempting to start a new terminal session from an existing terminal
session (using ctrl-shft-N). 

   There was an error creating the child process for this terminal

and a terminal window without a prompt (not running bash??)  The same
message and window appear when I try to start one from the GNOME menu.

From emacs, running the shell command produces the following message
(and a usable shell window):

  bash: cannot set terminal process group (-1): Invalid argument
  bash: no job control in this shell

ssh into box gives:

	PTY allocation request failed on channel 0

Neither dmesg nor /var/log/messages has any unusual messages


### recently emerged packages ###

app-crypt/gnupg-2.0.14
app-text/poppler-0.12.3-r3
dev-libs/libgcrypt-1.4.5
dev-util/global-5.7.7
media-libs/alsa-lib-1.0.21a
media-sound/alsa-headers-1.0.21
media-sound/alsa-utils-1.0.21-r1
sys-apps/util-linux-2.16.2
virtual/poppler-0.12.3-r1
virtual/poppler-glib-0.12.3-r2
virtual/poppler-utils-0.12.3-r1