06.23.2005 01:06
respawning too fast
If you run Linux or a Unix variant, sooner or
later, you'll get the 'respawning too fast ...' message on
boot.
One of ITWorld's newsletters is Unix in the enterprise (its URI is still its old name, Unix Insider), and in the June 15, 2005, issue, Sandra Henry-Stocker has an article on this topic, beginning with a brief explanation of init, the mother of all processes.
treeps is a graphical display of processes, and a screenshot of the program's output shows processes better, IMO, than `ps -ef` or `ps ax`:
If you've edited /etc/inittab and introduced an error, boot into single user mode and restore your previous version of the file. You did make a copy before editing it, didn't you?
One of ITWorld's newsletters is Unix in the enterprise (its URI is still its old name, Unix Insider), and in the June 15, 2005, issue, Sandra Henry-Stocker has an article on this topic, beginning with a brief explanation of init, the mother of all processes.
treeps is a graphical display of processes, and a screenshot of the program's output shows processes better, IMO, than `ps -ef` or `ps ax`:
The author parses /etc/inittab, identifying the colon-separated fields, helpful in identifying which program init is trying to spawn, and pointing to your possible typo in that line in /etc/inittab. So, adding this line to /etc/inittab runs a getty on tty12, which you can switch to with the keyboard combination ctrl-alt-F12:
treeps running
12:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty12the inittab file runs `/sbin/getty 38400 tty12` in runlevels 2 and 3, and if it fails or dies, respawns it.
If you've edited /etc/inittab and introduced an error, boot into single user mode and restore your previous version of the file. You did make a copy before editing it, didn't you?