William L. Maltby wrote: > On Mon, 2008-03-24 at 16:19 -0500, Dan Bongert wrote: >> mouss wrote: >>> Dan Bongert wrote: >>>> Hello all: >>>> >>>> <snip> > > >> Though 'ls' was just an example -- just about any program will fail. The 'w' >> command will fail too: >> >> thoth(118) /tmp> w >> 16:06:51 up 5:34, 1 user, load average: 0.94, 1.46, 2.04 >> USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT >> dbongert pts/0 copland.ssc.wisc 14:16 0.00s 0.22s 0.05s w >> >> thoth(119) /tmp> w >> 16:06:52 up 5:34, 1 user, load average: 0.94, 1.46, 2.04 >> USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT >> dbongert pts/0 copland.ssc.wisc 14:16 0.00s 0.22s 0.05s w >> >> thoth(120) /tmp> w >> >> thoth(121) /tmp> w >> > > Hmmm... Sure it's failing? Maybe just the output is going somewhere > else? After the command runs, what does "echo $?" show? Does it even > work? Echo is a bash internal command, so I would expect it to never > fail. Ok, it's definitely getting an error from somewhere: thoth(3) /tmp> ls thoth(4) /tmp> echo $? 141 Although: thoth(31) ~> top thoth(32) ~> echo $? 0 > What is your output device? A serial terminal? If so, could be simple > flow control issues. In fact, any serial connection (even a PC emulating > a terminal) could suffer from flow control problems. And they would tend > to be erratic in nature. I'm usually sshing into the machine, but I've also experienced the problem on the console. > If you are on a normal console, try running the commands similart to > this (trying to determine if *something* else is receiving output or > not) > > <your command> &> /dev/tty > > if this works reliably, maybe that's a starting point. Nope, that fails intermittently as well. > There's a couple kernel guys who frequent this list. Maybe one of them > will have a clue as to what could go wrong. Corrupted libraries and > whatnot. > > You might try that rpm -V command earlier against all packages (add a > "a" IIRC). Maybe some library accessed by the coreutils, but which is > not itself part of coreutils, is corrupt. Hmm....when I do a 'rpm -Va', I get lots of "at least one of file's dependencies has changed since prelinking" errors. Even if I run prelink manually, and then do a 'rpm -Va' immediately afterwards. -- Dan Bongert dbongert at wisc.edu