Setperms Problems

[Tim Fischer]

Bob Stockler wrote:

>Tim Fischer wrote (on Fri, May 06, 2005 at 12:16:24PM -0400):
>
>| I'm having some trouble with setperms - basically, it's starting, then 
>| hanging.  Here's what shows up on screen:
>| 
>| Checking for user 'filepro'...
>| 
>| User 'filepro' found, proceeding normally...
>| 
>| 
>| Setting permissions and ownerships for filePro programs
>| located in /u/appl/fp
>| 
>| 
>| Setting permissions and ownerships for filePro menus
>| located in /u/appl/fp/menus
>| 
>| 
>| Setting permissions and ownerships for filePro data files
>| located in /u/appl/filepro
>| 
>| -n .
>| 
>| Then it sits here until I kill it.  Has anyone seen this before?  Is 
>| there a flag I can use that will run setperms with logging enabled?
>| 
>| I'm on Solaris 9 using FP 5.0.13D4.
>
>Edit setperms so it's second line is:
>
>  set -xv
>
>Do you have the program "script" (that copies the standard output
>and standard error output to a file) on your system?  If so, execute
>it. then execute setperms, exit script by typing <Ctrl>+d and then
>look in the file "typescript" to see if you see why it's hanging.
>
>If you don't have "script", execute setperms (having made the above
>edit to it) and the part of its code where it hangs should be visible
>on your screen.
>
>Bob
>
>
>  
>

Bob,

Thank you, this helped alot.  However, this brings up a much bigger 
issue that doesn't make any sense.  You described the "set -xv" as a 
logging mechanism, which is exactly what happened.  Why then, would this 
actually fix the problem?  No, I didn't do anything else other than put 
the "set -xv" into the second line of the code and the issue failed to 
replicate. 

The scary thing is that this isn't the first time I've seen this.  I've 
had many instances where my code wouldn't work (though it looked like it 
should) and when I put a simple "system echo" in to my script to see 
what was going on, it started working.   A lot of my scripts still 
include logging to /dev/null simply because if that's not there, it 
doesn't work.

What the crap is going on?

-- 
Tim Fischer