UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

Hi all,

I run RedHat. Not a long ago it has started to give me message on the screen "Unable to load an interpreter". Just plain message. I checked log files. I havent found anything strange in there. Any suggestions what it might mean and how to get rid of it?

Thank you all.

As in it's displaying that on the console?
If it's on the console, it should also be in /var/log/messages

Did you change or move /bin/sh or bash?
Is it running from a startup script, cron, .bash_profile, etc?

The first thing to do is to find out what's causing it...

No i havnt touched bash, and i havnt change any scripts in .bash_profile. I have had my .bash_profile unchanged for about a year or so. Is there any possibility that my box has been hacked? Or any other possible suggestions?

I've never seen that before...

I did wonder if an intruder used a crappy script that tried to execute something that wasn't there (perl, ksh, python, etc).

Check all user's crontabs, look for new users in your passwd file (also check the shadow file for system accounts that all of the sudden have passwords).

Does it happen at any given time? Are you running any services (ftp, telnet, ssh, etc)?

Can you find anything in /var/log/* ?

Right after it happens, do an "ls -ltr /var/log/messages" to see if (or which) logs were written to.

And does it happen at the console when you're logged in, when the login banner is up, or both?

I have bunch of users on that machine. Is there any script to search through user's crontab files?

Thank you!

You know what? I just did what I should have done first:
Searched google.

I found this page:
http://linuxperf.nl.linux.org/general/common.html

Looks like it should be relatively simple to fix...

It explains everything!!!
Thanks a lot!!!