INIT: Command is respawning too rapidly...

[Stu Donaldson]

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"
...
>Naturally, the system then hangs up.
>
>Thanks in advance,
>
>- Paul

I recently (Sunday) had the same problem.  In my case, it seems
to me to be somewhat like black magic, but I'll share my experience
with you in the hopes it may help.

I recently found out about the TZ environment variable also holding
the effective julian date for daylight savings time.  I went to
edit /etc/TIMEZONE and added a somewhat lengthy comment to the
file describing the format of the variable, and complaining about
having to change it each year, since daylight savings time goes into
effect based on month and week, rather than on julian day. :-(.

Well sometime later, I rebooted my system with the same results
you described above.  I tried everything I could think of.  I must
have rebooted the system 20 times from the install disk and verified
that everything looked as it should.  I noticed that /etc/init does
reference the file /etc/TIMEZONE (strings /etc/init) but couldn't
find a reference to TZ in the init program.  On a whim, I changed
the file back to a oneliner setting up TZ (with a single line comment)
and amazingly the system booted just fine.  I later added several
lines of comments again to the file to verify my test, and found
the problem had returned.

Without the source to /etc/init, I surmised that init was reading
in /etc/TIMEZONE into a fixed length buffer and was overwriting
some internal variables with my longer file.  Needless to say, I
was very PISSED with such a STUPID BUG!  I suspect that there is
some reference to this "feature" burried deep in my incredibly
accurate and friendly documentation. :-(

So, has anyone else discovered this?  Hope this helps someone else
save 6 hours on a Sunday evening.

	-- Stu --
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Stu Donaldson                   "Can't you understand what I'm saying?" 
stu at mav.com                     "What happened?  Did you Fail Telepathy?"