Setup hangs in postinstall

[Michael Robbert <mrobbert at Mines dot EDU>]

A co-worker and I are trying to debug a problem that we came across 
while trying to do a new install of Cygwin on a clients computer. We 
have the current version of Setup.exe(2.416) and we have tried to 
install from a couple of mirrors, but even when doing just a base 
install the process hangs on two postinstall scripts. 
base-files-mketc.sh and base-files-profile.sh
If you hit cancel in setup you end up with a partially working system. I 
have been able to open a bash shell and kill those processes and the 
rest of the scripts run fine. I then try to run the scripts manually and 
they still hang. I have run them with sh -x to see where they're getting 
stuck and I have found that it is any time they try to assign a variable 
to the output of a command i.e.: OSNAME="`/bin/uname -s`"
I can reproduce the problem with just that line on from a bash or sh 
shell prompt. I have also tried to strace this command, but I get no 
output at all. Setting variables to a simple string works fine.

What is interesting is that the problem happens on both my laptop and 
the clients workstation, but not my co-workers laptop. They are all 
running XP SP1. I also can not reproduce the problem on another laptop 
that is running Windows 2000 SP4. There are a few less minor patches on 
my co-workers laptop, but that is the only difference that we can think 
of. What else can we look at to find out why this problem is happening 
on two computers, but not others?

--
Michael "Murph" Robbert
System Administrator for Math/CS
Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO  80401-1887
Office: GC249
Office phone: 303-273-3786
Pager: 303-461-6543
Email: mrobbert@mines.edu


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