garbage printed in xterms on reboot

[kent_dorfman766]

Ever seen anything like this?

Only upon reboot, all my autostarted xterm windows print a series of garbage lines before the bash prompt, and the number of garbage lines happens to equal the length of the prompt string.

I log in in text mode and startx through a .xsession file. This is X11, not wayland, and I configre two X displays as :0.0 and :0.1, each running openbox and tint2 instances. My xterm autostart from .xsession looks like

Code: Select all

# ----------------------------------------------------------------------
# setup xterms, supplying the proper screen offsets
xterms() {
    ofs=${1:-+200+100}
    cd $HOME
    xterm -title "MISC-xterm" -ls -sb -sl 2000 -bg blue4 -fg white -fn 10x20 \
        -geometry 150x40${ofs} &
    xterm -title "BUFFER-xterm" -ls -sb -sl 2000 -bg DarkGreen -fg yellow2 -fn 10x20 \
        -geometry 150x40${ofs} &
    ( # tally canvas
    cd /tally
    xterm -title "TALLY-xterm" -ls -sb -sl 2000 -bg darkred -fg yellow2 -fn 10x20 \
        -geometry 150x40${ofs} &
    )
}

exiting X11 to text mode and running startx again and the garbage lines dont appear. They only appear after a fresh reboot.

For purposes of testing PS1='user@\h:\w$ ' as set in /etc/bashrc.


Any clues?

[kent_dorfman766]

To follow up, I stripped down my .xsession file and replaced openbox/tint2 with twm, then incrementally reintroduced the bulk of my .xsession functionality and the problem hasn't resurfaced. This is time intensive since it involves a server reboot after every change...

Not sure what happened but it smells like a shell or xterm bug. Anyway, the report is here now for historical reference.

[kent_dorfman766]

Well, went away and powered down my machine. Came back and it's doing the bad behaviour again. Unfortunately, testing a problem that only occurs on power cycle isn't fun since each reboot from power off takes a good four minutes. Hmmm...