[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#693960: sysvinit: Undocumented, obscure limit for "process" field in inittab entries

[Johannes Truschnigg]

Package: sysvinit
Version: 2.88dsf-13.1+squeeze1
Severity: minor
Tags: patch


I added a new entry to inittab on a busy host which did not seem to start upon
invoking `telinit q`. Syslog received the following message:

Nov 22 10:16:29 r7 init: /etc/inittab[93]: process field too long

This limit (127 characters) is not documented in man 5 inittab, nor anywhere
else I looked. In init's source file, there are error messages the explicitely
state length limits for other fields in inittab (which a user is much less
likely to overflow, I think), which seems kind of weird.

The attached patch adds the length limit information to init's error message
and to the appropriate man page.


-- System Information:
Debian Release: 6.0.6
  APT prefers stable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-0.bpo.3-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages sysvinit depends on:
ii  initscripts        2.88dsf-13.1+squeeze1 scripts for initializing and shutt
ii  libc6              2.11.3-4              Embedded GNU C Library: Shared lib
ii  libselinux1        2.0.96-1              SELinux runtime shared libraries
ii  libsepol1          2.0.41-1              SELinux library for manipulating b
ii  sysv-rc            2.88dsf-13.1+squeeze1 System-V-like runlevel change mech
ii  sysvinit-utils     2.88dsf-13.1+squeeze1 System-V-like utilities

sysvinit recommends no packages.

sysvinit suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information
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