Password generator stalls when invoked

[benjamin-smith]

Never moves beyond this point. Started seemingly randomly about 2 weeks ago, worked fine before that.

Not familiar with debugging Alfred Workflows, what other info can I provide?

Using release v1.3.

[deanishe]

Could you provide:

• Alfred version number
• Any output in Alfred's debugger

[benjamin-smith]

Alfred v2.8.5 (439)

Nothing shows in the debugger for any command, see Gif: https://www.dropbox.com/s/c0m2d3eywwdjpig/alfred.gif?dl=0

The debugger is working for other workflows.

[rob-anderson]

I am also experiencing this problem. Rebooting the entire machine fixes it.

Thanks for this workflow btw - I use it all the time.

[benjamin-smith]

I've rebooted a few times, with unfortunately no change in behavior.

[rob-anderson]

This keeps recurring for me.

[deanishe]

It might be one of the generators. Which ones do you have turned on?

[benjamin-smith]

Not sure! The pwconf command also hangs indefinitely...

[deanishe]

@benjamin-smith Update Alfred and reboot your machine.

There is a known bug in older versions of Alfred 2 that causes workflows to hang.

[benjamin-smith]

I upgraded to latest version v2.8.6 (441), restarted a couple times – issue still persists. All of my other workflows are working as expected, only this one is hanging. Even pwconf continues to hang.

[peelman]

yeah...still having this issue, even using the version just released in february and the latest Alfred betas.

Running the scripts from the command line, they never exit. They return data, but just hang at the end.

You end up with a debug line like this when you finally do kill it:

python pwgen.py -d generate 96
12:09:50 workflow.py:2231 DEBUG    Workflow finished in 59.249 seconds.

I got tired of having to manually delete all the update code from the old version (the update python script has been hanging for me for ages upon ages every time a password was gen'd; when the project went into stasis I gave up on an update fixing it but couldn't find an alternative that worked as well, so was easier to just hack it for the time being). Glad I saved a copy of that for the time being...

[peelman]

I end up with a number of stalled/orphaned processes treed under Alfred.

[peelman]

Couple of notes:

Removing ~/Library/Application Support/Alfred 3/Workflows/net.deanishe.alfred-pwgen fixed my problem. When using pwgen next everything worked as expected.

Looking at the two directories, two things jumped out at me: I had a settings.json.lock file that had apparently been stuck in place since December of 2015.

My settings.json only showed a couple of minor differences:

So my guess would be that a bug or crash caused the lock file to not be removed and the lock file being persistently present was causing some issues and the script was not properly timing out or displaying a warning while waiting for the lock to be released, and none of these were problems with the old versions of pwgen I was using / hacking on in order to continue functioning.

So I guess ignore my previous two messages, unless you find this thread while working through similar problems, in which case, go to the aforementioned path and try removing an errant lock file.

@deanishe thanks for your hard work thus far 🥇. My only humble request would be some lock file timestamp checking and/or some timeouts implemented for safety!

[deanishe]

some lock file timestamp checking and/or some timeouts implemented for safety!

Will do. Clearly I was planning to do something along these lines, as Alfred-Workflow writes the PID to the lockfile, but I never got round to adding the code to read and check it 😔

[deanishe]

Hopefully fixed the hanging in v2.0.2 by updating Alfred-Workflow.