Bash is incredibly unstable on my system

PeterJansen · 2025-01-26 15:22:12

Since the last bash version (build date: 24th of September) there has been some instability. It started relatively innocent with 2 or 3 times that all of the sudden in the terminal the shell quit working, the terminal couldn't do anything with basic commands from the PATH-directories like ls but the bash' builtin commands did still work, for example I could cd. This happened 2 or 3 times in a few months time, no big deal except that it is annoying and I have to reboot my system. A recent update of my system made bash crash every 1 hour or so. It is abundantly obvious that bash crashed because of this:
- I couldn't type anything in a terminal anymore, any terminal.
- The output in deadbeef (when there was a 'crash' deadbeef pastes some terminaloutput in a 2nd window) becamse unreadable)
- I couldn't use any of my shell-commands via hotkeys anymore while my windowmanager (dwm) still worked fine. I could switch to other workspaces and all that but when I used a hotkey for a shell-command like opening dmenu nothing happened
- I couldn't use another tty anymore which makes sense if you have no running shell

After 2 days of all those crashes from bash and trying out a few things to exclude other factors I decided to stop using bash. I installed dash and zsh, I used chsh to make zsh my default shell and I changed the symlink for sh to dash. I had 0 crashes since then.

I have no idea what made bash so incredibly unstable on my system but I suspect that more people will have this issue so hopefully now we can find out what is going on and make bash usable again as the shell for those users. In case it is hardware-dependent: I have a 3700X (Ryzen of course) as my CPU and a 5700 XT GPU, the RDNA1-generation. Tip for everybody who changes the shell: you probably shouldn't have sh link to zsh, I tried it and xinit couldn't start an X11-session (dwm) until I had sh link to dash.

I can't prove it yet but my suspicion is that ffmpeg has something to do with crashing the shell. I noticed some weird behavior in ffmpeg too in the last few months which caused weird crashes in mpv (my mpv is setup in a pretty light way, nothing weird, just 3 well-known scripts, a few config-settings and some changed hotkeys). My problems with bash and ffmpeg started at the same time. Also the crashes happened when I was playing music or was playing a video, it didn't happen when I was gaming for a few hours. Maybe with my hardware a bug in ffmpeg causes problems for bash somehow?? That is just my guess. A fact is that bash is incredibly unstable right now on my hardware. I ddin't think that the shell could get crashed by other software but considering that bash hasn't been updated for months those crashes certainly are caused by other software which uses the shell.

V1del · 2025-01-26 16:02:17

Absolutely no issues here. Do you see stuff in the journal/dmesg when this happens, do you get coredumps? https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Core_d … _core_dump

Much more likely than some random bash inference is that there's something broken in your bash init files like .bash_profile/.bashrc or the like. FWIW what outputs do you get from

sudo journalctl -b | curl -F 'file=@-' 0x0.st
pacman -Qikk readline bash ffmpeg

Last edited by V1del (2025-01-26 16:03:26)

seth · 2025-01-26 16:59:28

couldn't do anything with basic commands from the PATH-directories like ls but the bash' builtin commands did still work, for example I could cd

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/SMART and keep "dmesg -W" running in sight as this yells "IO error"

Arch Linux

#1 2025-01-26 15:22:12

Bash is incredibly unstable on my system

#2 2025-01-26 16:02:17

Re: Bash is incredibly unstable on my system

#3 2025-01-26 16:59:28

Re: Bash is incredibly unstable on my system

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