"sort" from coreutils block root for a long time (3min) at boot; what is this in Debian11 64bits?

floppy_stuttgart · 01-26-2024, 01:31 AM

At boot, I see the process

Quote:

/usr/bin/sort -z

running which block my apt-get upgrade
sort is from coreutils and is version 8.32-4+b1

my system is a Debian Gnome 64bits
uname -v

Quote:

#1 SMP Debian 5.10.205-2 (2023-12-31)

Any idea why this sort must run and what it does? Any hint is welcome (no urgency: the PC works)

Sort is described there https://www.gnu.org/software/coreuti...ort-invocation

Quote:

‘-z’
‘--zero-terminated’

Delimit items with a zero byte rather than a newline (ASCII LF). I.e., treat input as items separated by ASCII NUL and terminate output items with ASCII NUL. This option can be useful in conjunction with ‘perl -0’ or ‘find -print0’ and ‘xargs -0’ which do the same in order to reliably handle arbitrary file names (even those containing blanks or other special characters).

Guttorm · 01-26-2024, 08:32 AM

Hi

It could be locate. There are 2 different ones, one old and a newer called plocate. Both basically scan the entire disk for files, sorts them, and let's you search for files by name. It takes some time to scan, and I think the old version was mostly a shell script.

It could also be some other tool. You can use "pstree" to get a tree of all processes. Then look for sort, and see what the parent is.