INIT: Command is respawning too rapidly...

[Jeremy Gryttpype Druker]

In article <1991Apr8.102837.12050 at hollie.rdg.dec.com> moore at forty2.enet.dec.com (Paul Moore) writes:
>>Can someone help me with this problem when I boot up my ISC-based system. I get
>>the following series of messages displayed on the terminal:
>>
>>    INIT: Command is respawning too rapidly. Check for possible errors
>>
>>    id: co "/etc/getty console console"
[and a number of other inittab lines]

...and thus answered slootman at dri.nl (Paul Slootman):

>Ummm... Go to single user mode (or maintenance mode, depending on the
>system). Check that
>a) /etc/getty is there and has execute permission, or isn't damaged in
>   any other way
>b) /etc/gettydefs is there and contains the entries used by the various
>   getty invocations, without errors (getty has a '-c file' option to
>   check a gettydefs-type file)
>c) the devices are there, i.e. /dev/console, /dev/vt01, etc. and that
>   these devices are available (ports on an expansion IO module won't

I had exactly that same problem, (with Intel UNIX, which I believe
is very similar to ISC) and battled for quite a while before
ultimately reinstalling Unix :-(  Even weirder was that it
happened twice in one week - to 2 different machines, both of
which had been running happily for months!

I had checked all the things Paul Slootman suggested.  I could
spawn getty successfully from single-user mode on any of the
terminals; it in turn would exec /bin/login correctly once a
user name had been entered.  getty -c was perfectly happy with
gettydefs.  I could start TCP/IP and rlogin from another machine.

When I modified inittab and telinit q'd init would again moan
about processes respawning too rapidly - even a line like
		name:012s:respawn:/bin/echo foo >/dev/console
would not cause "foo" to appear on the console.  Processes would
most certainly start up - if I timed a "ps -ef" just right I'd
see a <defunct> process waiting to be cleaned up, and the next
process number would be 5 or so higher than the last - 'cos init
spawned the inittab process 5 times before giving the error message.

If it happened before, it might happen again.  And next time, I'd
like to fix it without reinstalling!  Any other suggestions?

-J
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