Hi again all,A bit more digging gave some utterly strange behavior, which I think might be a heisenbug [1].
When mgetty is spawned, and is waiting for a login-name, I attached a strace to it with the following command:
strace -ff -o /tmp/strace-mgetty -p <pid of mgetty>At first it gave the same results as before, bash hung right after printing the motd. I stopped the strace, and suddenly the PS1 prompt was there. Magic. I decided to test this further and came up with the following results:
1) When executing a command that generates output (such as 'ls /'), output shows up fine, but no PS1 until I attach a strace to the pid of bash. 2) When executing a command that doesn't generate output (such as 'cat /dev/null'), output shows up fine (well, not really as there is none), and so does the PS1-prompt UNLESS I've already attached a strace to the pid. If a strace was attached, I have to cancel it in order to get the PS1-prompt again.
This seems to me as a problem that changes it behavior depending on wether it's being probed or not. Am I right?
If this is the case - how can I isolate the problem? Who should I report this to - right now I'm not sure where the bug is (bash? mgetty? kernel?). Any suggestions appreciated.
// Olle Görling olle@gorling.net [1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/H/heisenbug.html
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