Hi,

I've had a bit of trouble with a script that I want to run at startup. It uses 'probepart' so maybe Dougal is the guy to help here.

(It's SimonW from the murga-linux forums, hi Dougal).

Basically I run probepart in a shell script called from rc.local.
The error message I get is :
//.config/tmp/probepart: No such file or directory.

I'm still on the beta at present. Do you have any ideas? The script runs fine once startup is over. It's quite cool, mounts all available drives. If I could post attachments here, I would post it.

Thanks,
Simon.

The ".config" part clued me in. When the modifications were made to probepart I think Jason changed anything referring to /tmp to $HOME/.config so that it would work for more than one user (if a temp file were written by root then it could not later be overwritten by another user). This is actually a good thing in most cases, but since nobody is logged in while rc.local is running the $HOME variable is empty. This clues me in to a couple other problems as well, which have been plaguing scripts like "xlogin" and "xorgwizard".

I think it could be change3d so that instead of putting the temp files in $HOME/.config/tmp, they just go into /tmp and are either deleted when probepart exits, or else have the user's name as a suffix (eg. probedisk_root). In the case of the former, the temp files would just not exist to cause problems with other users later. In the case of the latter they would be named differently, and even if it ran before logging in then you would just get "/tmp/probedisk_" rather than "/tmp/probedisk_root", but any references to the temp file later in the script would not expect to find the "root" suffix anyway so things should function fine.

Anyway, this is a bug and should go on the tracker, because I'm not going to have a chance to go through that script and others which might have the same problem for a while. But hopefully I've given you or someone else enough to go on for now.

Nathan

Thanks Nathan,

You got me thinking of a workaround -- I defined HOME in my script thus:

HOME=/root

I was hoping it would be inherited by the probepart instance. It seemed to be, as probepart then worked well!

Since my scripts are run from rc.local I guess they are run with root privileges, so it's the right location for me. I could have used anywhere below which there was a .config/tmp directory tree.

I'll try to add it to the tracker and mention the workaround too. Never done that before, cheers,
Simon.

Simon -

I went ahead and added this to the tracker already. Since the probepart script was pretty short I went ahead and made the mods I mentioned to it, moving the temp file to /tmp and just deleting it when probepart exits. So far it seems to be fine. I'm building rc2 right now, which will probably be blessed as the final should nothing else major come up.

Nathan