Unable to Run inxi in Debian
I have a “system info” script that gathers information and converts the data into a Dokuwiki compatible format. Recently I wanted to add an inxi -m output to list the memory sticks in the system’s memory slots. I wanted to add this after updating a rack server at work. The RAM sticks were a mix of 4 GB and 8 GB modules. The information would be useful with recovering from a failure.
On Debian systems nothing I tried would get inxi to launch inside the shell script. The inxi command would hang. In another terminal window I noticed inxi was launching recursively. Within a several seconds there were more than a hundred instances running.
The inxi command worked fine in Slackware and CentOS. I tried different solutions. Nothing. I was stumped.
After some time the proverbial light bulb appeared in my head. I looked at the inxi version. The Debian version was 3.0.x. The other systems were 3.1.x.
Because inxi is a perl script, I copied the version from CentOS to a Debian system. My system info script ran fine and did not hang.
Could I be so lucky as to find an updated inxi in Debian backports?
Yes, I could be so lucky. Updating inxi from backports resolved the hanging problem.
Sometimes computers are exhausting. I was more than a little angry throughout the entire episode.
Posted: Category: Usability Tagged: Debian
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