How can a command crash the shell it runs from?

Martin Drozdik

2/10/24, 8:11 PM

I am running some tests in an android emulator. I launch them from the command line:

npm run start:e2e

and once in a while, the command crashes so hard that the terminal window closes abruptly. If I am running it in the IDE, then that crashes too.

I am not trying to solve the problem, merely to understand how such a thing happens.

Even if I make the following script:

#!/bin/bash

exit

and source it in the shell, the terminal window does not close.

Is there some way to post-mortem such a crash?

242

0 + 2

command-line

bash

crash

Raffa

2/10/24, 9:28 PM

Many ways possible for "crashing the shell" some of which might be imposed from outside the shell process itself e.g. system OOM killer ... But internally the exit call e.g. `bash -c 'exit'` will terminate the sub-shell forked for that script ... While the parent-shell running in the terminal will still be running ... To kill the parent-shell from a sub-shell, you can do e.g. `bash -c 'kill -9 $PPID'` ... Where the environment variable `$PPID` holds the parent process ID of the current sub-shell.

Martin Drozdik

2/11/24, 1:01 AM

@user68186 Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS with 5.15.0-60-generic kernel.

Elon Musk

I sit in a Tesla and translated this thread with Ai:

EN: How can a command crash the shell it runs from?

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