Mojave 10.14.6
I just experienced a weird problem after a hard crash. The problem
went away after a 2nd reboot. I thought I'd report it here as a ...
data point.
I caused the crash. That is, the keyboard stopped responding after I
exposed my spaces ("Mission Control"?), my only recourse was to hold
down the power key until yea did darkness descend.
On restart , the proximate symptom was using open(1) in xterm, which
yielded the message:
Couldn't get a file descriptor referring to the console
Then
$ man open
showed a man page for openvt
Also, /usr/loca/bin was mis-mapped somehow. A script I use all the
time to open a set of terminals on a remote machine was
"nonexistent". Thinking the file had somehow been lost, I tried to
restore it from Time Machine, which reported the file to exist. Sure
enough, Finder reported it to exist in
Macintosh HD? ? ?usr? ? ?local? ? ?bin?
but in bash, it was not in /usr/local/bin. It was at that point that I
tried "open /usr/local/bin", and received the "no descriptor" message.
That was enough weirdness to provoke me to try a controlled restart,
which *eventually* worked.
As Chrome was reopening its 50+ tabs, I started X per usual. Then I
ran this script to open 8 xterms for my 9 Spaces:
#! /bin/sh
for T in {2..9}
do
sleep .2 # help XQuartz keep up with process
xterm -ls -title $T &
done
Engineering note: If that tiny sleep is omitted, the map of terminal
name to cmd+number keyboard shortcut gets munged. Terminal 5
might get assigned to cmd+3 or cmd+6. Waiting seems to help XQuartz
keep up. <sigh>
The first time I ran that script, *some* of the processes still did not
see my script in /usr/local/bin. But others did, which meant at least
the whole system wasn't munged. So I closed them and re-ran the
script. Third time's a charm: everything worked per usual.
A pure guess consistent with observed experience is that HFS log
recovery hadn't completed, and stuff went missing while it did its
thing. That might possibly explain why the Finder showed my script,
but the shell did not.
If you, dear reader, have a suggestion of where to look that
might have recorded the problem, I'm happy to do the perusing.
Otherwise, we can chalk it up as one of the lesser problems of 2020.
--jkl
_______________________________________________
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
X11-users mailing list ([email protected])
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/x11-users/archive%40mail-archive.com
This email sent to [email protected]
