Awk complains when emerging every package

Oblomov · n00b Joined: 24 Nov 2003 Posts: 14

Hello,
in the final phase of an 'emerge anypackage' I always get:
[...]
>>> Regenerating /etc/ld.so.cache...
* Caching service dependencies...
awk: cmd. line:1: (FILENAME=/etc/init.d/xfs FNR=296) warning: error
writing standard output (Broken pipe)
>>> Auto-cleaning packages ...
[...]
Any idea why is this happening and how to solve it?
Bye,
Riccardo

ianneub · Posted: Sat Jan 31, 2004 1:37 am Post subject:

Did you find an answer to this problem? I'm experiencing it too after emerge -u to gawk 3.1.3
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Oblomov · n00b Joined: 24 Nov 2003 Posts: 14

Unfortunately not until today

Bye

stimuli · Posted: Sun Feb 01, 2004 4:35 am Post subject:

You aren't using Reiserfs, are you?

Oblomov · n00b Joined: 24 Nov 2003 Posts: 14

No, I am using ext3.
Bye.

ianneub · Posted: Sun Feb 01, 2004 7:23 pm Post subject:

I'm using Reiserfs on /, ext3 on /boot
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stimuli · Posted: Mon Feb 02, 2004 9:32 am Post subject:

Intersting. Because I was thinking of writing a thread entitled "DO NOT use Reiserfs under linux/ppc! Here's Why!" that details the hours and hours of bullshit and reinstalls before finally figuring out that the root of all my problems was reiserfs.

Reiserfs is fucked, plain and simple. When it works, it works great. When it fails, it fails horribly. If for whatever reason your machine crashes, locks up, hangs, etc, the last few files that were read/written to the disk get majorly corrupted. Everything from my .bashrc to /usr/portage/* to /etc/* files got fucked. So my bashrc looks like:

#!/bin/bash

alias lsl='ls -al --color'
alisDJR#H(*$%FHJUERHFDU#ROUNDSWOBDYEUBCY#ERBCYEWBHNWSX #@$#I$U*%(#%*U*$**$*$*#$*(U$ $**$*$*$#*$*$#*#@#$(##EE#OF)($KDOJE(*J#FD*#F#*(RF*#($FH#&FH*R#HRF&*)HQ#$ RFV&*RG *&GF *

If say I'm tweaking my /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 and try to startx and it hangs, reboot, open up /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 and sure enough it is garbled junk, as is the last two or three other files I had opened.

Major files got screwed, which lead to instabilities, which lead to hangs, which lead to more corruptions. My /usr/portage/ was a separate partition because I was getting tired of building/installing the same packages every time I reformatted root in frustration. What I didn't realize until later was that because /usr/portage was also reiserfs, my ebuilds were getting corrupted (and not getting relplaced with uncorrupted ones after emerge syncing), as well as my binary packages. It was leading to portage failing and spewing errors galore (perl and awk especially), errors while building the portage cache after installing ebuilds, etc.

Finally, I reformatted both / and /usr/portage to ext3, all problems went away. I no longer bite my fingernails if I have to force reboot (which I don't as stability is no longer an issue) wondering what essential system file is now corrupted junk.

Everything is how it should be, nice and stable. Whatever marginal performance gain reiserfs brings over ext3 is not worth it to me. It was the root of all sorts of other problems, again: awk and Perl not functioning correctly, leading to portage not functioning correctly, leading to a sketchy system, leading to... etc etc.

So Reiserfs does not fail gracefully; Beware!

ianneub · Posted: Mon Feb 02, 2004 6:15 pm Post subject:

Wow!

I'm surprised you've had so many problems with ReiserFS. I use it on about 15 machines in a production environment and haven't seen the problems your describing.

While I won't toss aside the possibility of ReiserFS being the cause, here I believe its more portage's, or my own fault when I upgraded awk. I'm pretty sure that I haven't hard reset the box before the awk problem started.

Thanks for your info stimuli, I'll look out more carefully in the future for sure!
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stimuli · Posted: Tue Feb 03, 2004 8:30 am Post subject:

It's possible my problems were a 2.6.x/ppc problem. I also found HFS+ support to be crashy (reading MP3s from my OSX partition).

YMMV

bug138 · n00b Joined: 09 Feb 2004 Posts: 5

I am seeing this problem too, the same complaint about /etc/init.d/xfs. I am not running reiserfs. I am running a 2.6.2-ben1 kernel on a dvi tibook.

Ideas?

fifo · Guru Joined: 14 Jan 2003 Posts: 437

This is a duplicate of this thread: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=99634. No one seems to know why this happens, but there is the simple solution of just deleting /etc/init.d/xfs .