Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!nntp.coast.net!howland.erols.net!surfnet.nl!newshost.vu.nl!cs.vu.nl!kjb
From: kjb@cs.vu.nl (Kees J Bot)
Subject: Re: Shell problems
Nntp-Posting-Host: hornet.cs.vu.nl
References: <53c84r$a7e@crl.crl.com>
Sender: news@cs.vu.nl
Organization: Fac. Wiskunde & Informatica, VU, Amsterdam
Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 07:12:28 GMT
Message-ID: <Dyy40t.Jyu@cs.vu.nl>
Lines: 27

pfortran@crl.com (Kurt Weiske) writes:

>I went on vacation, and when I came back to my MINIX box (1.7.4, 286, 2 
>megs RAM) any user account that has a non-standard shell (shh or ash, 
>gleaned from the usual sources on the net) fails - the login prints out 
>/etc/motd on the screen, followed by the error "exec failure", and the 
>session is disconnected.

>(Luckily, root still uses the default shell)

>This worked fine for weeks, and I did nothing to the machine while I was 
>gone - it spontaneously stopped. Any clues?

No clues, thanks to the dumb error message.  If you can recompile
src/commands/simple/login.c then please change the line

	write(1, "exec failure\n", 13);

into
	fprintf(stderr, "login: can't execute %s: %s\n", sh, strerror(errno));

That won't fix the problem, but may tell us what the problem is.  (Now
if anyone still wonders why root has the simple shell...)
--
long:  http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/minix.html         Kees J. Bot  (kjb@cs.vu.nl)
short: http://www.cs.vu.nl/ftp/minix/README.html        Systems Programmer
ftp:   ftp://ftp.cs.vu.nl/pub/minix/		   Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
