[Pkg-shadow-devel] Bug#659878:

[Plmalternate Plmalternate]

FWIW:

I found this bug report last July by searching for the exact same
error message OP has. I get it when I try to log out of an Openbox
session .

The command

openbox --exit

shuts down the openbox session as expected but instead of a
lightdm/lightdm-gtk-greeter gui login screen as usual, x is shutdown
and I get dumped to tty 7, already logged in as root, judging by the
prompt. Tty 7 is where my x normally runs. So x has shutdown but login
fails to start. Nothing I type appears on the monitor.  The last
output on tty 7 is:

Bash: Cannot set terminal process group (1015): Inappropriate ioctl for device
Bash: No job control in this shell

The only key combinations I've found to elicit any response are:

Cntrl-Alt-Fn where n is any digit in the range 1-6, inclusive, to
which it responds normally, switching to the indicated tty.

and

Cntrl-Alt-Del which causes a normal reboot.

I can switch to one of the other ttys and use it normally, including
starting x and logging in graphically, but if I log out, the same
thing happens again, and now I have another unresponsive tty.

Reinhard Karcher's observation about su holds for me to:

me at hal:~$ su - -c bash
Password:
bash: cannot set terminal process group (-1): Inappropriate ioctl for device
bash: no job control in this shell
root at hal:~#

Strictly, I'm running the Debian-derived Ubuntu 14.04 LTS installed
from the mini-iso with none of the bling, plus xorg, openbox & thunar
and  such, rather than Debian per se. But I believe we use the same
login package unmodified and this certainly appears to be a bug we
inherited from Debian, so I figured this info is more likely to be
useful here alongside the similar accounts than anywhere else.