UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi there

I am running soalris 9 on a sun fire 480r and all of a sudden (today) whenever the users run the command `top` we get the following message `bus error`

does anybody have any information on what this is all about and whether there is a routine i can perform to gather more information on this

any help on this would greatly appreciated

Hi,

There're many reasons for a "bus error". It may be because the program ( top ) is trying to do some I/O operation to a device that has no permissions or does not exist... confirm that that only happens with top... is there any core dump ? It can be caused by bad programming too... or some OS issue...

Unfortunately this is often caused by failed hardware, either a dead disk or a mainboard problem with the bus to the disk. Try doing other commands that will access each of your disks like du, ls, cd, etc. and see if you can pin down a pattern. If it truly is just the top command doing it a corrupted program or version conflict is possible, but if you get many different commands all failing when trying to access the same disk it is probably hardware.

See this post.

Oppps... that old post was written when we had html enabled. I have edited it to make those include lines readable...