Hi ,

I was trying to execute a shell script(abc.sh) which called another shell script(execute.sh) in setsid and moved it to background . Something like this :

setsid ./execute.sh > $USER_ID-execute.out 2>&1 & >> log.out
This was called from abc.sh

Somehow the above execute.sh was launched infinitely , and the processes kept on increasing like :

30894 ? Ss 0:00 /bin/bash ./execute.sh
30899 ? Ss 0:00 \_ /bin/bash ./execute.sh
30904 ? Ss 0:00 \_ /bin/bash ./execute.sh
30909 ? Ss 0:00 \_ /bin/bash ./execute.sh
30914 ? Ss 0:00 \_ /bin/bash ./execute.sh
30919 ? Ss 0:00 \_ /bin/bash ./execute.sh
30924 ? Ss 0:00 \_ /bin/bash ./execute.sh
30929 ? Ss 0:00 \_ /bin/bash ./execute.sh
30934 ? Ss 0:00 \_ /bin/bash ./execute.sh
30939 ? Ss 0:00 \_ /bin/bash ./execute.sh
30944 ? Ss 0:00 \_ /bin/bash ./execute.sh
30949 ? Ss 0:00 \_ /bin/bash ./execute.sh
30954 ? Ss 0:00 \_ /bin/bash ./execute.sh
30959 ? Ss 0:00 \_ /bin/bash ./execute.sh
30964 ? Ss 0:00 \_ /bin/bash ./execute.sh
30969 ? Ss 0:00 \_ /bin/bash ./execute.sh
30974 ? Ss 0:00 \_ /bin/bash ./execute.sh
30979 ? Ss 0:00 \_ /bin/bash ./execute.sh
30984 ? Ss 0:00 \_ /bin/bash ./execute.sh
30989 ? Ss 0:00 \_ /bin/bash ./execute.sh
30994 ? Ss 0:00 \_ /bin/bash ./execute.sh
30999 ? Ss 0:00 \_ /bin/bash ./execute.
31004 ? Ss 0:00 \_ /bin/bash ./execute
31009 ? Ss 0:00 \_ /bin/bash ./exe
31014 ? Ss 0:00 \_ /bin/bash .
31019 ? Ss 0:00 \_ /bin/ba
31024 ? Ss 0:00 \_ /bi
31029 ? Ss 0:00 \_
31034 ? Ss 0:00


Eventually I lost connection to that linux box and I got below message :

Connection to vm-abc closed.

And now when I try to ssh the box I get message as :
ssh: connect to host vm-abc port 22: Connection refused

So I need solutions for 2 problems :
1. Why did the script went to infinite loop ?
2. What can be done now to get the linux box back ?

I am able to ping this linux box .

Any pointers would help , TIA.

How could anyone here know the answer if we can't see the scripts. I would say you are probably making a recursive call from one script to the other. Just wait a while to get back in, maybe a day or so.

1. The script has a recursive loop in it, as AwesomeMachine says. Please post the script, so we can help debug it.

2. Reboot the Linux machine. If you have set that script to start at boot, you will need to do one of the following:

2a. If the machine is a VM/cloud instance, shut it down and detach the boot volume. Attach it to another VM. Boot the other VM. Mount the detached volume, edit the startup configuration to stop the script from starting at boot. Unmount and detach the volume from the other VM. Re-attach it to the original VM. Boot.

2b. If the machine is on bare metal (physical computer), shut it down and boot up with a live USB or CD. Mount the hard drive, edit the startup configuration to stop the script from starting at boot. Unmount the hard drive. Reboot.