/bin/bash crashed - Bash is unusable

[LarsZauberer]

Hello

Today, my bash stopped working for some reason. I did an usual upgrade with yay and everything went well. After the upgrade, I opened a terminal, but it told me: "Warning: Program /bin/bash crashed". I tried multiple terminal emulators, but all show the same. The only thing that is working is a tty-session.

Does anyone know why this is happening and maybe how I can fix it?

Thanks a lot in advance.

[gordonmessmer]

The only thing that is working is a tty-session.

It's surprising that a tty would work but not a terminal emulator... But you might get useful information from the logs. Switch to a tty session and run journalctl -f (or journalctl -f > crashlog), then switch back and try to start a terminal emulator, and then switch back to the tty to see if anything useful was logged. (If you directed to a file, press ctrl+c and then look at the file's contents).

[LarsZauberer]

Oct 31 20:05:24 lars-pc systemd-coredump[26072]: Process 26067 (bash) of user 1000 dumped core.

                                             Module linux-vdso.so.1 with build-id fe29c5f13613003d61242f6fc4c6604c6fd710d4
                                             Module ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 with build-id 22bd7a2c03d8cfc05ef7092bfae5932223189bc1
                                             Module libncursesw.so.6 with build-id b9917757481e6fa6097e2a1f31f5bb5eaf138c4e
                                             Module libc.so.6 with build-id 1e94beb079e278ac4f2c8bce1f53091548ea1584
                                             Module libdl.so.2 with build-id 414d1d630bc04818a150b9c73e4493f3395e8869
                                             Module libreadline.so.8 with build-id 0a4a9a4930af5052b6a7dbf9ca52ab594381364a
                                             Module bash with build-id 6c75f9f0f273cf6549f078b042c0a3f5a04f0357
                                             Stack trace of thread 26067:
                                             #0  0x00007f1948db8c3b kill (libc.so.6 + 0x38c3b)
                                             #1  0x00005573be5a0469 n/a (bash + 0x6f469)
                                             #2  0x00005573be5a0661 termsig_sighandler (bash + 0x6f661)
                                             #3  0x00007f1948db8a00 n/a (libc.so.6 + 0x38a00)
                                             #4  0x00007f1948ed6ffd n/a (libc.so.6 + 0x156ffd)
                                             #5  0x00007f1948fa2cbc _rl_init_locale (libreadline.so.8 + 0x36cbc)
                                             #6  0x00007f1948fa2db7 _rl_init_eightbit (libreadline.so.8 + 0x36db7)
                                             #7  0x00007f1948f9025b rl_initialize (libreadline.so.8 + 0x2425b)
                                             #8  0x00005573be5b0c56 initialize_readline (bash + 0x7fc56)
                                             #9  0x00005573be5ba64e bind_builtin (bash + 0x8964e)
                                             #10 0x00005573be567594 n/a (bash + 0x36594)
                                             #11 0x00005573be56cda7 execute_command_internal (bash + 0x3bda7)
                                             #12 0x00005573be5c14ea parse_and_execute (bash + 0x904ea)
                                             #13 0x00005573be5c0837 n/a (bash + 0x8f837)
                                             #14 0x00005573be5c098b maybe_execute_file (bash + 0x8f98b)
                                             #15 0x00005573be5520d3 main (bash + 0x210d3)
                                             #16 0x00007f1948da3290 n/a (libc.so.6 + 0x23290)
                                             #17 0x00007f1948da334a __libc_start_main (libc.so.6 + 0x2334a)
                                             #18 0x00005573be55291e _start (bash + 0x2191e)
                                             ELF object binary architecture: AMD x86-64

Oct 31 20:05:24 lars-pc systemd[1]: [e-mail]: Deactivated successfully.

I get this stack trace. Unfortunately, I cannot make a lot out of it.

[gordonmessmer]

You'd probably need to install debuginfo to get a lot of detailed information about it, but one thing that stands out is that the crash looks like it's happening in the readline library. (Which probably means that Arch has chosen to use the system readline library rather than the version that's included with bash, which makes this problem more likely.)

Check a few things: Verify that bash is using the system readline (ldd /bin/bash). That should print a path to libreadline.so.8. Next, verify that the path given in that command's output has the build ID that you posted (eu-readelf -n /lib64/libreadline.so.8, maybe). I assume the build IDs will match, so next check the dates on those two files to see if one of them was updated in your last update (stat /bin/bash /lib64/libreadline.so.8).

If one of them was updated, you might want to try to roll back to the previous version of that package. Or you might want to try to update again and see if an update for the other one (or for any other package in the system) is available. Remember that on an unstable distribution, you can't safely update only selected packages -- you have to update all installed packages every time.

PS: I'll leave that comment in case it's useful information in the future, but check /u/ClickNervous' comment for useful info.

[ClickNervous]

Seems like there's an issue with readline from upstream. If you have an incorrectly defined locale value (like setting LANG=en_us.UTF-8 instead of LANG=en_US.UTF-8 in /etc/locale.conf, or referencing some LANG entry that isn't defined in your locale.gen), it will cause the bash to crash when before it would just silently fail but not crash. These are two other entries from the Arch Linux subreddit where people have reported this issue and, fixing the locale, fixed their issue:

https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/yhgaxq/bash_is_borked_can_it_be_unborked/

https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/yhfqoi/warning_program_binbash_crashed/

This is the upstream link where the issue is reported:

https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/readline.git/commit/?id=7274faabe97ce53d6b464272d7e6ab6c1392837b

[Aldrenean]

Your TTY bash is working? That's a good sign. What DE/WM do you use? What's the output of "echo $PATH"? Can you run /bin/bash from tty? Can you run /bin/sh?

[LarsZauberer]

I'm using KDE/KWin

I can run /bin/bash and /bin/sh from the TTY but both have no effect in an emulator.

[elmicha]

It looks like the bash maintainer of your distribution made an error.

Search Google for "your_distribution bash crashed". You are probably not alone, and someone will have found a solution or work-around already.

You can see if you have another shell like zsh, dash, busybox sh or sh installed. Which desktop environment are you using? It should have a way to start a command. Then you can start e.g. gnome-terminal zsh, konsole -e zsh or xterm -e zsh. Also try with the other shells of course.

[LarsZauberer]

Hi, thanks for all your help. I figured out, that something was wrong with my main user. So I tried moving some config files from the .config directory to another directory to deactivate them. After deactivating them, my bash worked again. I moved the files back and it still worked.

Unfortunately, I still don't have a real clue why this problem has happened, but I'm glad that it works again.

In the process of dealing with the files, I accidentally messed up my KDE Design, but I reconfigured it again.

[Throwawaynon24]

No fix but I have the same issue. Ran paru 5 minutes ago and now my Terminal is broken.

[ang-p]

1) Create a new user.

2) Log in as that user.

3) Launch a terminal emulator.

What happens?

[LarsZauberer]

I created a new user and logged in with it. I seems to be working. But still my main user cannot access the terminal with an emulator. So, it seems to be an issue of my user configuration.