Problem with Bamboo script task hanging indefinitely at "exit 0"

[Andrew Stiles]

I have a "script" task that completes successfully, but Bamboo doesn't seem to recognize that it's complete. The task itself is an inline script that does some simple setup (creates directories and symlinks) and then as the last line it executes another script with `/bin/sh -x build.sh`. This script runs to completion, with the last line being `exit 0` to ensure a successful exit code. In the Bamboo job log, I see the last line of the log is `+ exit 0` indicating it successfully reaches that point, but the Bamboo job never moves on from there to the final tasks of the job.

The agent is running on OS X. If I monitor the agent running the job with `ps` to check on the execution of the task, I see the temporary script created by Bamboo as well as the `build.sh` script running until they complete, then the processes disappear as expected. Bamboo itself doesn't seem to recognize that it's done, though.

The `build.sh` script does quite a lot of things, and it's possible that it's trampling on the bamboo agent process somehow. What might cause Bamboo to behave this way? What can I do to troubleshoot this?

[Andrew Stiles · Accepted solution]

Turns out this was caused by some dangling child processes that weren't getting terminated properly. Finding these and ensuring they were killed by the end of the script resolved the issue.

[Isaac Stennett]

Andrew could you clarify what you mean by "dangling child processes"? I'm experiencing this same issue, but all I do in my script is start up a web server. I don't know what child processes I would be needing to kill. Thanks!