Lowell Boggs, Jr. - 2016-06-07

If a brash script, or a brash command line that you are typing in from the console hangs, and will not respond to control-C, you will likely have to kill the console window that it is running in.

This is almost always results from very many pipe members in a pipe statements.

Brash is a threaded application with a fixed size thread command pool. The size can be controlled in 2 ways:
the command line option -threads threadCount
 set the environment variable BRASH_THREAD_COUNT before starting brash

The default number of threads is 20. Though this may change over time.

If you realize that you have a script that will always need to be run with more than the default number of threads, you can put this at the top of your script:

if [ "$BRASH_THREAD_COUNT" -lt 40 ]
then
     #
     #  if an insufficient number of threads is currently available,
     #  based on the complexity needs of this script (ie the pipe depth)
     #  then reinvoke brash with more threads and rerun the script.
     #

     cmdline="$0"

     for f in "$@" ; do cmdline="$cmdline '$f'" ; done

     brash -threads 40 -c "$cmdline"

     exit $?
fi

In this example, the needed number of threads is 40. due to other statements in this script. The above code, at the top of the script, simply re-invokes the same script in a new brash instance but with the needed number of threads.

If a permanent increase in the size of the thread pool is desired, set the BRASH_THREAD_COUNT variable in the windows invironment before invoking brash. See 

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Last edit: Lowell Boggs, Jr. 2016-06-07