[Savannah-hackers-public] Trapped signals in cron and login environment

[Bob Proulx]

I have been (slowly) chasing down some noise in the new Trisquel 7
systems.  One of them is this message written to cron from one of the
cronjobs every time it is run.

  gzip: stdout: Broken pipe

That is a sample.  Seeing the "Broken pipe" message I know immediately
that SIGPIPE is inappropriately trapped.  So I look to see if it is
trapped in the shell.

  address@hidden:~# trap -p
  trap -- '' SIGTSTP
  trap -- '' SIGTTIN
  trap -- '' SIGTTOU

Huh?  The login environment sets up users with those job control
signals ignored?  That's bad.  Why are those trapped?  That isn't
normal.  But that isn't SIGPIPE.  Not being of help about the cron
script problem I set up a very small cron test.  Because of course
running the script from the command line doesn't produce any noise.
The problem must be only when run from cron.

  */2  * * * *   root /root/bin/trap-test

  address@hidden:~# cat bin/trap-test 
  #!/bin/bash
  exec >/tmp/out 2>&1 </dev/null
  trap -p

  address@hidden:~# cat /tmp/out
  trap -- '' SIGPIPE

As suspected SIGPIPE is being ignored for cronjobs.  That's bad.  (On
my Debian system I find SIGINT ignored.  Not great either but doesn't
cause the problems of SIGPIPE ignored.)

Trapping SIGPIPE is one of the deja nu bugs that we see again and
again.  It gets fixed.  Then someone decides to ignore SIGPIPE again
elsewhere.  One of those wack-a-mole problems that just keeps
appearing again and again in different places.  Sigh.

The only way to really fix this bug is to find the parent process
location where it is being ignored and to stop that happening.  Stop
it from ignoring SIGPIPE.  I will keep walking up the process tree
until I find where this is happening.  I pulled the Trisquel source to
cron and it doesn't seem to be happening there.  Hopefully this
doesn't go all of the way into the 'upstart' init system.

Soo...  It looks like these indicate two independent and different
signal handling bugs to find and fix.

Just a communication update in case other folks are hitting signal
problems too...

Bob