Imagine we have a cron script that runs a hypothetical process under user foo.
foo@box> git pull
For whatever reason this process gets stuck/hung and freezes.
Then you run
su -c 'git --version' foo
What you experience is that this process gets stuck. And you have to kill it.
Then you kill the original process (the foo@box> git pull
). After you kill the first stuck process – then a re-run of the second command works.
I saw this (with a different application to git
) – but I’m trying to explain the order of unix operations (system calls) that could lead to this behaviour.
My question is: Can a su exec be blocked or hung by a similar process?