Maybe perl was being upgraded when you tried to run those scripts? Or maybe the scripts were on an unavailable filesystem? Does it still happen or was a one time thing?
Vinko Vrsalovic
2009-09-05 22:28:49
A:
It was a one-time thing. I suspect it was related to disk activity, but I'd like to know what's going on.
chris
2009-09-05 22:36:21
A:
This always has to do with the perl interpreter (/usr/bin/perl) being inaccessible. In fact, it happens when a shell script is running or awk or whatever is on the #! line at the top of the script.
The cause can be many things ... perms, locked file, filesystem offline, and on and on.
It would obviously depend on what was happening at the exact moment you ran it when the problem occured. But I hope the answer is what you were looking for.
Rap
2009-09-05 22:42:36
The error message "text file busy" has a specific meaning, and wouldn't be caused by any of the issues you mentioned.
2009-09-05 23:10:44
@duskwuff, care to elaborate? Can you share your wisdom with the rest of us? (btw, my research says exactly what I was sharing).
Rap
2009-09-05 23:32:37
+4
A:
I'd guess you encountered this issue.
The Linux kernel will generate a bad interpreter: Text file busy error if your Perl script (or any other kind of script) is open for writing when you try to execute it.
You don't say what the disk-intensive processes were doing. Is it possible one of them had the script open for read+write access (even if it wasn't actually writing anything)?
cjm
2009-09-06 00:39:51
That sounds reasonable - I was working on the script, and this happened just as I saved it and then tried running it.
chris
2009-09-06 15:47:22
So probably the "disk-intensive process" didn't do anything to your script directly, but it kept the disk busy enough that your stalled while writing out the script and kept it open for several seconds.
hobbs
2009-09-06 22:21:20
Sorry, I know you understood what I meant, but typos bug me. I meant "your editor" above of course :)
hobbs
2009-09-10 06:07:56