write to 1 failed [No space left on device]
 

We are getting this error "write to 1 failed [No space left on device]" sometime while running a shell script on a shared computer node.

This happened when the following line is called in a busy waiting loop:
if test "$A='YES' -a $B='ttt' -a ` expr $c % 6` -eq 0

It happens to other system commands as well:
cat $file | head -1

My impression is some system resource is exhausted, but I can not figure it out.

Please note, this is different with "Write error: No space left on device", which is usually caused by disk space limitation, and can be reproduced with writing to /dev/full

My questions are below:
1) Does "1" here mean stdout? How could it be out of space?
2) How to reproduce this error message (exactly same one) with the available device under /dev ?
3) How the problem can be solved?

Thanks,

you are using ksh? which version?

Thanks for your reply. We are using ksh and here is the version information:

ksh --version
version sh (AT&T Research) 93t+ 2010-06-21


Is there anything wrong with this particular version?

Thanks,

I have same "write to 1 failed [No space left on device]" in ksh sometimes. Any idea what resource is exhausted.