Installpkg hangs

Originally Posted by xor_ebx_ebx Hm, well my best guess is that either an update was interrupted or some misbehaving software or user has accidentally (or intentionally) deleted some of your symlinks Does installpkg hang with other packages or just Firefox?

It hangs with every package I've tried. No one else uses this computer.

Thanks

Did you try rebooting and running fsck like Pat and Bob suggested? If I'm not mistaken, you can force fsck to run on the next reboot by running `touch /etc/forcefsck` or you can go into single-user mode and do it from there

Other than that, I'm out of ideas

No I haven't had time, didn't want to risk a reboot while working, and didn't have the install disk. Dropping into user level 1 wouldn't allow me to check the root filesystem if I'm not mistaken. Also are you sure the forcefsck file should go in /etc? I thought it should be in the root directory.

From /etc/rc.d/rc.S:

if [ -r /etc/forcefsck ]; then
  FORCEFSCK="-f"
fi

So, yes, it's /etc/forcefsck

And you can indeed run fsck from single-user mode, but you'll probably have to remount your / partition read-only first

My usual method with unexpected hangs in shell scripts to add a lot of debugging lines with echo to find where its getting stuck in the script. It should be much easier to understand what is going wrong if we can see how far its getting. Or you could try using "bash -x /path/to/script" which will produce more noisy output while more or less achieving the same.

Originally Posted by BCarey No I haven't had time, didn't want to risk a reboot while working, and didn't have the install disk. Dropping into user level 1 wouldn't allow me to check the root filesystem if I'm not mistaken. Also are you sure the forcefsck file should go in /etc? I thought it should be in the root directory.

If /etc isn't in the same file system as /, you will have lots of problems at boot.

Originally Posted by xor_ebx_ebx From /etc/rc.d/rc.S: if [ -r /etc/forcefsck ]; then FORCEFSCK="-f" fi So, yes, it's /etc/forcefsck And you can indeed run fsck from single-user mode, but you'll probably have to remount your / partition read-only first

That's good to know! Pretty much everything online states it should be in the root directory, but when I tried that on one of my machines a few months ago, it didn't work. It must be distro specific (or maybe init specific).

OK, back at it.

So I did run the fsck via /etc/forcefsck and it did identify disk errors. I told it to fix the errors. I then reran fsck before rebooting and it declared the disk clean. But after rebooting it ran the check again (I thought forecefsck was supposed to be automatically deleted) and came up with the same errors. So even though it showed everything fixed before reboot it seems that nothing was.

That's starting to look like a bad disk. You should look into smartctl and see if your disk has logged any errors. Something like `smartctl -a /dev/sda`