Inittab

[Dave Elliott]

I want to change the following entry in inittab so that it doesn't just send output to dev/console but to a file, i thought about using the TEE command but wondered if anyone has done this before or could offer advice on possible construct.

brc1::bootwait:/sbin/bcheckrc /dev/console 2>&1 # fsck, etc.

[U.SivaKumar_2]

Hi,
I wont recommend to change that line.

regards,
U.SivaKumar

[Dave Elliott]

Iknow that this i high risk, i am trying this on a test system where i am the only person who uses it so no problem.
but i think that it should be possible as at the end of the day it is a script and therefore as long as i get the syntax correct should work.
worst case is i have to boot to single user mode and copy the orig file back in and restart.

[Stefan Farrelly]

I think the format to try should be;

brc1::bootwait:/sbin/bcheckrc &1 | tee /brc1.log >/dev/console


But im not sure that at the point this runs that any filesystem is mounted except / but you may have to try /stand instead for the logfile.

[U.SivaKumar_2]

Hi,
brc1::bootwait:/sbin/bcheckrc > /home/bceck 2>&1
will be enough for that.

regards,
U.SivaKumar

[Stefan Farrelly]

On second thought it might not be able to find the tee command as its in /usr/bin, you may need to copy to /sbin first then change command to;

brc1::bootwait:/sbin/bcheckrc &1 | /sbin/tee /brc1.log >/dev/console

[Trond Haugen]

Stefan is right about tee not being available because no dirs but / is mounted yet. For the same reason U.SivaKumar suggestion should put the file on / too.

regards,
Trond

[Frank Slootweg]

And copying [/usr/bin/]tee to /sbin will not help, because /usr/bin/tee uses shared libraries ("chatr /usr/bin/tee"), which are on /usr, which is not yet mounted.

[Luc Bussieres_1]

Hello,


With tee being in /usr/bin you cannot achieve what you want to do. The file in that directory are dinamically linked and they need the library that are in /usr/lib so even movin tee in /sbin won't work. You will need the source code of tee and rebuild it statically link.

Luc

[Stefan Farrelly]

All this talk about tee not working if copied to /sbin - baloney. Ive just tried it in my inittab file and it worked absolutely fine!

[Dave Elliott]

How i have tried it in the initab file and everything still works the way you would expect excetp that there is no file created.

[Stefan Farrelly]

Hi Andrew,

ah, thats because exec cant handle the pipe character which means you cant use tee, you need to do it in 2 stages this way (works fine on my test server);

brc1::bootwait:/sbin/bcheckrc /brc1.log 2>&1 ; cat /brc1.log >/dev/console

[Frank Slootweg]

Stefan, I am afraid that "All this talk about tee not working if copied to /sbin - baloney.", isn't baloney!

You imply that you have tried it, but later you say "exec cant handle the pipe character which means you cant use tee", so I guess you did *not* actually try it, or did not try it with a reboot, etc..

Even if you did try it with a reboot, you still might have been 'lucky', because, as I wrote, /usr/bin/tee *does* use shared libraries, so it could fail under certain circumstances (different LANG?) and you don't want failures at boot time, especially not for bcheckrc.

[Stefan Farrelly]

Look Frank, I DID try it - you clearly didnt. Wind your neck in.

[Frank Slootweg]

Stefan,

Let's please scale down the tone a bit.

Please post which command you did try, because from your postings it is not clear (i.e. contradictory information).

For what it is worth, I only warned about the dangers, i.e. using an executable which uses shared libraries, without /usr mounted is asking for trouble. I don't think it is wise to implement something which happens to 'work' if you know that there potential problems with the approach (i.e. in this case missing shared libraries).

[A. Clay Stephenson]

My first impression (without reading any of the responses) was that this can't possibly work because it would require that /usr be mounted even if tee were moved to /sbin because tee requires shared libraries.

If you do an ldd /usr/bin/tee, you will find that indeed requires shared libraries.

If you really wanted to do this, it would be quite easy to code a statically linked equivalent of tee and put it in /sbin. This should be only a few lines of C.