shell execute not working after a while

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I use shell execute in rules for several purposes like

execute \"sudo reboot\"
execute \"sudo service pimatic restart\"

This has always worked well. Lately, however, there have been problems.
After a while, maybe hours or a few days, execute does not work anymore. There are no
errors logged. When I restart pimatic application via unix shell everthing is OK again.

I use the execute command intensively for controlling speech output with woli and I detect the problem when the tablet stays quiet for a certain time.

when $woli-speech changes and $woli-speech != \"\" then execute \"echo -n wolido:volume:12 | $woli1\" and execute \"echo -n wolido:speak:$woli-speech . | $woli1\" and after 1 second set $woli-speech to \"\"

@heizelmann Are you sure the executed commands terminate as expected? Maybe processes are piling up?

@mwittig Don’t know how t check this. In pimatic log I see the execution of the rule. Nothing else. I try to restart pimatic by execute command with a button device again and again and wait some seconds in between, but nothing happens. Then I test other commands like the woli speak from a unix shell, which works well. Then I restart pimatic via shell and after this everything works well again for some time.

with the ps -aux command you can see on the console which tasks are actually running. if the tasks are piling up as marcus mentioned, you will see them here.

I am not a unix expert. ps -aux show me a process list but what should I do with it?

@heizelmann like mentioned earlier, this is usualy caused by scripts that are pilling up.

Lets say i have a script that checks my wifi every 10 seconds, but the script does not end itself properly, i woulf see allot of entry’s of my script in ps aux

What I see with the ps -aux is that sometimes the nc command hangs.When I kill this process the problem is gone for a while.

execute “echo -n wolido:speak:hello | nc -4u -w1 <myip> <myport>”

Now the question is how to avoid the hanging? I am not a Unix expert but looked a bit around
and found socat as an alternative to nc. Meanwhile I will try this

execute “echo -n wolido:speak:hello | socat -t1 - UDP:<myip>:<myport>”

May be someone else have another idea.

@heizelmann try:

execute “echo -n wolido:speak:hello | nc -4u -w0 -c <myip> <myport>”

Using -w 0 might do the trick. Another thing to try is -q 0.

See also: https://serverfault.com/questions/498880/nc-netcat-hangs-waiting-for-more-data-in-udp-mode

‘socat -t0’ doesn’t work. I need to enter at least 1 second. Right now, socat seems promising. It feels to me it’s faster, too.

The nc -w0 -q 0 option I will try next. Needs some days for longterm result.Thanks for help!

@heizelmann again, try -c. So you actually -close the script…

@gleno0h -c is not a valid option of nc.

@heizelmann said in shell execute not working after a while:

-c is not a valid option of nc.

I also stumbled on this. The last post of the thread on Serverfault is not applicable. May be at has been substituted by -q 0