Re: Bash crashes on detaching Screen

[Darshit Shah]

On 12/02, Eduardo A. Bustamante López wrote:

On Tue, Dec 02, 2014 at 11:29:59PM +0530, Darshit Shah wrote:

On 12/02, Darshit Shah wrote:

[...]

>When I attempt to detach a running Screen session using `screen -Drr
>,session name` command, the original shell which contained the screen
>session does not return to a prompt. It instead remains hung and a while
>later I get the message:
>
>Warning: Program '/bin/bash' crashed

You're using screen's power detach (-D -r), from 'man screen':
|       -D -r   Reattach a session. If necessary detach and logout remotely 
first.

Notice the *logout* part.

If you check screen.c (from GNU screen's source code), you will find:
| 1896  *D_POWER    SIG_POWER_BYE  power detach -- attacher kills his parent
| 1897  *D_REMOTE_POWER SIG_POWER_BYE  remote power detach -- both

Then, in attacher.c, function Attach(how):
185       if (ret == SIG_POWER_BYE)
186         {
187           int ppid;
188           if (setgid(real_gid) || setuid(real_uid))
189         Panic(errno, "setuid/gid");
190           if ((ppid = getppid()) > 1)
191         Kill(ppid, SIGHUP); /* notice this part */
192           exit(0);
193         }

It sends a SIGHUP to the parent process, i.e. bash.


So, now that we know that, let's test it:

Shell 1:
dualbus@hp:~$ PS1='remote> '
remote> echo "$BASH_VERSION"
4.3.30(1)-maint
remote> screen -S bug -s ~/local/bin/bash
[... screen issues a clear screen... ]
dualbus@hp:~$

Shell 2:
dualbus@hp:~$ PS1='attacher> '
attacher> screen -Drr bug
[... gets the cleared screen from before ...]
dualbus@hp:~$

Shell 1:
[remote power detached from 3739.bug]
zsh: hangup     ~/local/bin/bash
    ^ this tells us that bash was killed by a SIGHUP


Now, let's try again, ignoring SIGHUP:

Shell 1:
dualbus@hp:~$ PS1='$$ remote> '
3994 remote> trap '' HUP # ignore SIGHUP
3994 remote> screen -S bug -s ~/local/bin/bash
[.. again screen clears the terminal ..]
dualbus@hp:~$

Shell 2:
dualbus@hp:~$ PS1='$$ attacher> '
3954 attacher> screen -Drr bug
[.. we get the cleared screen ..]
dualbus@hp:~$

Shell 1:
[remote power detached from 4043.bug]
3994 remote> echo I am alive
I am alive


#1 shell survived the power detach, because we ignored the SIGHUP sent by
screen to its parent. Now... what does this mean?


I means that:
* It's not a bash bug. Bash is supposed to die from SIGHUP if you're not doing
 anything to handle it. In fact, if you're using that screen's feature, it's
 *supposed* to log out/kill its parent shell.
* It happens to other shells.

I just recompiled my Bash with debugging symbols and attempted to run Bash
under gdb. Here is the trace I received:


[remote power detached from 19442.pts-1.mordor]

Program received signal SIGHUP, Hangup.

Yep, dies from SIGHUP. Don't use screen's power detach (-D -r) if you don't
want this to happen. I normally use (-d -r), which doesn't have this effect.

Hey Eduardo,







--
Thanking You,
Darshit Shah

Thanks a lot for such a detailed explanation of why this happens. I guess I didn't read the Screen Man page correctly and started using power detach. For a long time I had no issues, but it seems like Konsole has problems when Bash suddenly exits like that. None of the other emulators gave any serious problems, but Konsole would be stuck with a crash notice. It was this crash notice which led me to believe that the fault is in Bash. I'll start using the normal detach, -d -r, and also report this issue to the Konsole team and see such exits can be handled more gracefully by them.

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