[SOLVED] most shell commands I run are sent to background

eco · 11-21-2012, 05:17 PM

Hi all,

I got my raspberry pi and all was well until it started forking most of my commands to the background...

Code:

rpi ~ $ apt-cache search website
aiccu - SixXS Automatic IPv6 Connectivity Client Utility
akregator - RSS/Atom feed aggregator
aylet - ncurses-based player for Spectrum '.ay' music files
aylet-gtk - X-GTK2-based player for Spectrum '.ay' music files
calibre-bin - e-book converter and library management
cclive - lightweight command line video extraction tool
cmatrix - simulates the display from "The Matrix"
collectd-core - statistics collection and monitoring daemon (core system)
concordance - Harmony remote configuration tool
confluence - language for synchronous reactive hardware system design
[...]

[1]+  Stopped                 apt-cache search website

rpi ~ $ libghc-snap-core-dev - Snap: A Haskell Web Framework (Core)
libghc-snap-core-prof - Snap: A Haskell Web Framework (Core); profiling libraries
libghc-snap-server-dev - iteratee-based, epoll-enabled web server for the Snap Framework
[...]

[1]+  Done                    apt-cache search website

I replaced both .profile and .bashrc in my home directory but it did not help.

I tried using dash but got the same issue.

it seems I am/was not alone. I found at least one other person having the problem and we are both debian based...
Ubuntu Forum

I tried all that was recommended he try but as for him, nothing fixed the problem.

As expected, the error is random and not only for apt commands...

Code:

$ hyde serve --port 8083 --address 0.0.0.0
 17:46:08 hyde.engine Reading site configuration from [./site.yaml]
 17:46:10 hyde Starting webserver at [0.0.0.0]:[8083]
[...]
 17:46:17 hyde.engine Generating site to [./deploy]

[2]+  Stopped                 hyde serve --port 8083 --address 0.0.0.0

I have to kill the process each time this happens!

Does anyone have a clue on what this could be?

Thanks!

mmoreno80 · 11-22-2012, 10:51 AM

You could try to run those processes using strace to see why they go to background.

Description

In the simplest case strace runs the specified command until it exits. It intercepts and records the system calls which are called by a process and the signals which are received by a process. The name of each system call, its arguments and its return value are printed on standard error or to the file specified with the -o option.

eco · 11-22-2012, 12:11 PM

Hi mmoreno80,

That was very helpful! I did a little debugging and found out that I had setup a little bash script that limited processes to use a maximum of 40% of the CPU...

Fine with daemons but not with foreground processes!

So the script would execute:

Code:

cpulimit -p 1465 -l 40 -z &

which would send the whole process to the background... sigh.

Thanks for the tip