Re: bash reads on device when it shouldn't...

[Greg Wooledge]

On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 06:47:43PM +0000, K??rlis Repsons wrote:
> I've set up a system, which has some disks, that are not always used, but are 
> always mounted. OS and program files are all in other place and the only 
> program, which still reads some blocks (echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/block_dump), 
> that doesn't point to any specific files, is bash. It happens sometimes when 
> I log in or time after time as bash is running somewhere. And it spins up 
> those disks... 

"When I log in" is probably bash reading your dot files (/etc/profile,
~/.bash_profile, ~/.bashrc) and whatever the commands in those files tell
it to do.

"Time after time as bash is running" is probably the mail check, unless
you've told bash to store history in some nonstandard way.  (This would
also be likely to occur at login.)

"man bash" will tell you how to disable the mail check, if you'd like to
try that.  If you'd like to find out what's actually happening, you might
need to use something like truss/strace/etc. with timestamps, and then
refer back to the trace when you observe the disk behavior, and see what
bash was doing at that time.