Arch Linux

JokerFMJ

Member

Registered: 2012-09-09

Posts: 13

[RESOLVED] Terminal Opening Windows Until System Crashes.

So I've been using Arch for a couple of weeks now and haven't had any real major issues. Mostly learning curve things. However, yesterday I changed my default shell from /bin/bash to /usr/bin/alacritty, it is important (potentially) to note that I did not reboot after doing so. This morning I changed my default shell from /usr/bin/alacritty to /usr/bin/kitty, then I rebooted and logged back in. At this point I opened a terminal window and the system just kept spawning terminal windows until the point where my system crashed.

From there I logged in as the root user and was able to open a terminal window without issues. So I changed my passwd file back to using Alacritty, rebooted, but when I logged in the same issue persisted. I was wondering if anyone knew where/what to check to see why this application launch loop seems to have started.

Thanks!

Last edited by JokerFMJ (2024-07-24 15:13:21)

JokerFMJ

Member

Registered: 2012-09-09

Posts: 13

Re: [RESOLVED] Terminal Opening Windows Until System Crashes.

Going to apologize here and now. As I was writing that post it hit me that I never changed my terminal editor back to /usr/bin/bash and rebooted (as I never rebooted initially after changing it to Alacritty). I went ahead and made that change and things are working normally now. There appears to be an issue when I make Alacritty my default terminal editor. So the root cause of that issue is unknown, but the root cause of my persistent application spawning issues was the change from /usr/bin/bash to /usr/bin/alacritty.

Sorry for wasting anyone's time.

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,456

Website

Re: [RESOLVED] Terminal Opening Windows Until System Crashes.

The root cause is that alacritty and kitty are terminal emulators not shells.  You set your default shell to be a terminal emulator which is nonsensical: when a terminal starts, it launches the default shell.  This really shouldn't have even been possible though if you followed the recommended methods of changing your default shell (i.e., "chsh").  Rather it sounds like you are editing /etc/passwd directly which is a horrible idea.  Do not do that.  Ever.

---

"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

JokerFMJ

Member

Registered: 2012-09-09

Posts: 13

Re: [RESOLVED] Terminal Opening Windows Until System Crashes.

The root cause is that alacritty and kitty are terminal emulators not shells.  You set your default shell to be a terminal emulator which is nonsensical: when a terminal starts, it launches the default shell.  This really shouldn't have even been possible though if you followed the recommended methods of changing your default shell (i.e., "chsh").  Rather it sounds like you are editing /etc/passwd directly which is a horrible idea.  Do not do that.  Ever.

I definitely initially changed them through the terminal using chsh -s and then corrected them in root by editing the passwd file directly for my user account. That definitely explains what happened though so thank you for the explanation. I'm going to go learn myself and do some reading.