Hi
I am facing a weird problem, requesting experts to give some suggestion.

If I run a script which contains command “top –n1 –b > dump_text.txt” from bash or from command prompt, it works fine. (means all "top output" is dumped to dump_text.txt file)

However, when I run the same script during "boot up of the system", I get following error

'dumb': Unknown terminal type

After `googling`,I found several threads such as

http://www.unixguide.net/linux/faq/09.02.shtml
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...t-work-572162/

and did the following changes

echo " Current term is $TERM"
top -b -n1
export TERM=xterm
echo " Current term is $TERM"
top -b -n1
export TERM=console
echo " Current term is $TERM"
top -b -n1
export TERM=linux
echo " Current term is $TERM"
top -b -n1


and the result was as below
'dumb': unknown terminal type.
Current term is xterm
'dumb': unknown terminal type.
Current term is console
'dumb': unknown terminal type.
Current term is linux
'dumb': unknown terminal type.
'linux': unknown terminal type.

We have "heavily" tweaked Root file system and using older version of linux kernel (2.6.18) and upgrading kernel at current stage is not feasible. Unfortunately we do not have "ps" feature either. Considering the fact that if the script works fine from shell prompt / bash, I expect it to work during boot up also (just to add, "top" binary was present at that boot stage when script was running)

Considering above constraints, any suggestion would be very helpful.

Thanks in advance

Hey vrs,

programs that simply output plain text to stdout should not even consider $TERM. Maybe you have a buggy version of top installed on your system?
See here: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=130517

Regards
dmdeb

did you by chance forget that "_" underscore?

i hate using those , they are WAY TOO EASY TO MISS

First of all, thanks all (dmdeb/john) for their help/time for this issue.
i had tried with “top –n1 –b > dump.txt”, issue was still same.
Tried with exec (where script1 calls script2 and script2 does the `exec') and also with source, still same issue.

Intention of top was to figure out memory hogging process/pids, wrote a script which "cats" statm of each PID, reads 2nd field "RES ", converts PAGES to KB size and then divides by overall memory of the system( obtained by "getconf PAGESIZE").

The above solution worked fine without top usage .

if all you want to do is find out what process is doing what at boot
why not just use "bootchart"
http://www.bootchart.org/

Intention was to run a script which periodically runs and prints/captures memory hogging PID, could have done with "cron" but as said, RFS has been heavily tweaked and and "Cron" feature is also not available

Seems that it goes looking for some terminfo regardless. An strace of "top -n 1 -b " redirected to a text file on my F16 (was done from a X term BTW) shows it cycling through to /usr/share/terminfo/d/dumb. Which was provided by ncurses-base.

If you have a severely stripped system, you may not have even the barest defaults it's looking for.

yes, but what puzzles me is that if the same command is given from shell command, it works fine..
thanks

I think during the boot the top has no access to any terminfo (and related stuff), so it assumes the worst case, a dumb terminal.