BASH_FUNC_module Error

[micknudsen]

Hi,

Since Friday, I have been getting this error each time I run a job on the cluster. Things seem to work fine, though. Any clue what it means?

[michaelk@fe1 ~]$ srun --pty bash
srun: job 1311239 queued and waiting for resources
srun: job 1311239 has been allocated resources
bash: BASH_FUNC_module(): line 0: syntax error near unexpected token `)'
bash: BASH_FUNC_module(): line 0: `BASH_FUNC_module() () { eval `/usr/bin/modulecmd bash $*`'
bash: error importing function definition for `BASH_FUNC_module'

/Michael

[Anders Halager]

It has to do with the wonderful "Shellshock" bug in bash. If an environment variable is defined as "() { X }; Y" it will define a function containing X - that part is fine, the bug is that when loading that variable bash will also execute Y.. a pretty big security risk for web servers and the like.

Hastily fixing this 25 year old bug breaks some existing software, who would have guessed? :)

In our case it is probably a combination of the environment modules software(that I don't think is in use) and a newer bash on the frontend than on the compute nodes.

Anders