Agent Inventory fails to retrieve agentparm.txt and agent logs from RHEL agents with coreutils-single package installed

Products

• CA Workload Automation AE

Issue/Introduction

When the coreutils-single package is installed on an agent machine running on any RedHat or derivative of RedHat such as CentOS, Rocky Linux, Oracle Linux, etc., the following Agent Inventory actions will no longer work for that agent...

View Agent Details
Download AgentParams
Download Logs
Stop Agent
Restart Agent
Update AgentParams

Environment

Release : 12.0

Component : WORKLOAD CONTROL CENTER

Cause

coreutils-single provides a single multicall binary (coreutils) for all of the GNU core utilities, which includes echo. The original core utility binaries are replaced with wrapper scripts that call the coreutils command with the necessary arguments.

The actions listed above all result in a job on the agent that runs an echo command. The coreutils-single package will change /bin/echo to a script that looks like this...

$ cat /bin/echo

#!/usr/bin/coreutils --coreutils-prog-shebang=echo

When the agent is running in AutoSys mode, shell validation is enabled.  This causes the agent to try to read the first few bytes of the file to be executed if it finds a #!... it will assume we are dealing with a script.  So in this case it is detecting the shell to be /usr/bin/coreutils.  This is not recognized by the agent as a valid shell so the command will fail.

Resolution

There is no workaround for this issue other than to revert back to the original coreutils package rather than coreutils-single.