System:
RHEL 7.6
cfengine-community 3.10.3
CFEngine log files and emails for a small number of our clients have:
"ps output line '...' is shorter than its associated header"
Correspondingly the "-v" output from "cf-agent" has:
-----------
verbose: C: BEGIN classes / conditions (pass 1)
verbose: Observe process table with /bin/ps -eo
user,pid,ppid,pgid,pcpu,pmem,vsz,ni,rss:9,nlwp,stime,etime,time,args
error: ps output line 'user-id 35911 1 8597 0.0 0.0 123668 0
2504 2 Mar11 2-22:28:49 00:00:00' is shorter than its associated header
-----------
(I've obfuscated the user-id.)
Running that quoted 'ps' command manually and scanning the output, I see:
-----------
user-id 35772 1 8597 0.0 0.3 1022928 0 54292 5 Mar11
2-22:32:59 00:00:48 kleopatra
user-id 35905 1 8597 0.0 0.0 782440 0 6144 5 Mar11
2-22:32:04 00:00:28 /etc/speech-dispatcher/modules//espeak.conf
user-id 35911 1 8597 0.0 0.0 123668 0 2504 2 Mar11
2-22:32:04 00:00:00
user-id 35913 1 35913 0.0 0.0 94272 0 952 2 Mar11
2-22:32:04 00:00:00 /usr/bin/speech-dispatcher
-----------
Note that pid 35911 lacks any command-line information ("args").
(As an associated observation (clearer in a monospaced font) pid 35905 has two
spaces, rather than a single space, separating the end of the time, 00:00:28,
from the args, "/etc/speech...". This is probably irrelevant.)
Our calling bundle is doing a 'processexists("...").
It would seem that when "cf-agent" is internally invoking a 'ps' command, the
processing of the output is not cleanly allowing for an empty "args" result
(our pid 35911).
This seems to be a bug. (A quick Google search indicates that something
similar has been seen a few years ago in AIX and Solaris: CFE-2446 and
CFE-2161.) But we are RHEL7.6 Any thoughts?
Of course, this prompts again the thought about whether all this could be much
more cleanly handled on OSes that support "/proc", relegating the "ps"
mechanism to those few OSes that lack "/proc": CFE-1655. But that is probably
another story for another time...
-- David Lee
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