[Solved] Date command not working, maxing out memory and cpu.

Question

So I've encountered and incredibly strange problem.
Today, I was working on a script for my bar panel. I was following z3bra's guide "Meeting at The Bar Really simple stuff, nothing harmful:
#! /bin/sh
# Fox - do whatever
# Gathers various info to be displayed on a panel using BAR
clock () {
date '+%a %y/%m/%d %I:%M'
volume () {
sed -n 's/^.*\[\([0-9]\+\)%.*$/\1%/p'
cpuload () {
mpstat 1 1 | awk '$3 ~ /CPU/ { for(i=1;i<=NF;i++) { if ($i ~ /%idle/) field=i } } $3 ~ /all/ { print 100 - $field }'
memused() {
read t f <<< `grep -E 'Mem(Total|Free)' /proc/meminfo |awk '{print $2}'`
bc <<< "scale=2; 100 - $f / $t * 100" | cut -d. -f1
network() {
#The Following assumes you have 3 interfaces: loopback, ethernet, wifi
read lo int1 int2 <<< `ip link | sed -n 's/^[0-9]: \(.*\):.*$/\1/p'`
# iwconfig returns an error code if the interface tested has no wireless
# extensions
if iwconfig $int1 >/dev/null 2>&1; then
wifi=$int1
eth0=$int2
else
wifi=$int2
eth0=$int1
fi
# in case you have only one interface, just set it here:
# int=eth0
# this line will set the variable $int to $eth0 if it's up, and $wifi
# otherwise. I assume that if ethernet is UP, then it has priority over
# wifi. If you have a better idea, please share :)
ip link show $eth0 | grep 'state UP' >/dev/null && int=$eth0 || int=$wifi
#This is now the time to see if network is up or not. For that, a simple ping would do the trick:
# just output the interface name. Could obviously be done in the 'ping'
# query
echo -n "$int"
# Send a single packet, to speed up the test. I use google's DNS 8.8.8.8,
# but feel free to use any ip address you want. Be sure to put an IP, not a
# domain name. You'll bypass the DNS resolution that can take some precious
# miliseconds ;)
ping -c 1 8.8.8.8 >/dev/null 2>&1 && echo "connected" || echo "disconnected"
groups() {
cur=`xprop -root _NET_CURRENT_DESKTOP | awk '{print $3+1}'`
tot=`xprop -root _NET_NUMBER_OF_DESKTOPS | awk '{print $3}'`
# Desktop numbers start at 0. if you want desktop 2 to be in second place,
# start counting from 1 instead of 0. But wou'll lose a group
for w in `seq 1 $((cur - 1))`; do line="${line}="; done
# enough =, let's print the current desktop
line="${line}|"
# En then the other groups
for w in `seq $((cur + 2)) $tot`; do line="${line}="; done
# don't forget to print that line!
if (($cur < "10"))
then echo $line=
else echo $line
fi
nowplaying() {
cur=`mpc current`
test -n "$cur" && echo $cur || echo "- stopped -"
# This loop will fill a buffer with our infos, and output it to stdout.
while :; do
buf=""
buf="${buf} [$(groups)] -- "
buf="${buf} CLK: $(clock) -"
buf="${buf} NET: $(network) -"
buf="${buf} CPU: $(cpuload)%% -"
buf="${buf} RAM: $(memused)%% -"
buf="${buf} VOL: $(volume)%%"
buf="${buf} MPD: $(nowplaying)"
echo $buf
# use `nowplaying scroll` to get a scrolling output!
sleep 1 # The HUD will be updated every second
done
Once I finished it up, I ran it, and nothing happened. So I took a break, and then came back to troubleshoot it. I ran
bash -x panel.sh
and didn't see anything weird so I started to just run each command and make sure my syntax was alright. However, right away when I ran date, no output was generated and within seconds my computer came to a crawl, so I rebooted manually.
Now, whenever I simply run (without any parameters)
date
the exact same thing happens and within seconds htop reports 100% memory usage and nearly 100% CPU usage on all four cores. Luckily, if I'm fast enough, ctrl-c still ends the operation of date.
I've tried reinstalling coreutils,but that doesn't seem to fix the problem and I can't completely remove it first since a lot of things depend on it.. I have no clue how to even start fixing this. Anyone have an idea?
Realized where I went stupid, in my ~/Scripts folder, I made a script named date without remember that I had recently added that folder to my PATH. So I created a recursive loop that within seconds would crash my computer... oops.
Last edited by FoxzTrot (2015-02-08 04:00:24)

Answer 1

I have found the solution! I post how I managed in case someone else has the same issue.
You have to go to "Settings" -> "Settings Editor".
There, there is a "display" entry.
When you open the tree, you can see both of your displays (in my case, LVDS1 and VGA1).
Under VGA1 (the "extra" monitor), there is a "Position" entry. There, you need to set the "X" variable to the last pixel of the other display resolution.
E.g.: if you principal display is a "1366x768", then the "X" value will be 1366.
You can also play on the "Y" if your screens are not horizontally aligned, but 0 should be fine.
I hope this helps :-)