Problem in 8.4 with Exiftool

[otheus_uibk]

BUG REPORT / QUESTION

At least in version 8.4 (previous versions in 8.x series untested), the nuxeo java process tries to spawn several instances of exiftool, but these are all spawned without any arguments. When spawned without arguments or incorrect options, exiftool version 9.90 redirects the user to the perldoc program of itself, which is a clever way of presenting a usage / help information in the form of self-documenting code. I cannot see in the nuxeo code where exiftool might be called without arguments, but clearly this is happening.

A post in these forums from October 2016 indicates the problem also exists with nuxeo 7.10 on the Mac, which would indicate a very recent version of exiftool. So question: is this a bug? Is there a work-around?

12005 ?        Sl    35:07 /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.8.0-openjdk-1.8.0.102-1.b14.el7_2.x86_64/jre/bin/java 
12048 ?        S      0:00  \_ /usr/bin/perl -w /usr/bin/exiftool
12059 ?        S      0:00  |   \_ /usr/bin/perl /usr/bin/perldoc /usr/bin/exiftool
12049 ?        S      0:00  \_ /usr/bin/perl -w /usr/bin/exiftool
12062 ?        S      0:00  |   \_ /usr/bin/perl /usr/bin/perldoc /usr/bin/exiftool
12051 ?        S      0:00  \_ /usr/bin/perl -w /usr/bin/exiftool
12057 ?        S      0:00  |   \_ /usr/bin/perl /usr/bin/perldoc /usr/bin/exiftool
12053 ?        S      0:00  \_ /usr/bin/perl -w /usr/bin/exiftool
12060 ?        S      0:00  |   \_ /usr/bin/perl /usr/bin/perldoc /usr/bin/exiftool
12055 ?        S      0:00  \_ /usr/bin/perl -w /usr/bin/exiftool
12067 ?        S      0:00  |   \_ /usr/bin/perl /usr/bin/perldoc /usr/bin/exiftool
12058 ?        S      0:00  \_ /usr/bin/perl -w /usr/bin/exiftool
12064 ?        S      0:00  |   \_ /usr/bin/perl /usr/bin/perldoc /usr/bin/exiftool

[Florent_Guillau]

The command is launched without arguments to check if it's present in the path and therefore available for use.

[Florent_Guillau · Accepted solution]

Thanks for reporting this, there's a real issue for commands that have a large output when run without arguments. We've opened a ticket, NXP-20934.

[otheus_uibk]

A work-around would be to modify the check-command to that -ver is used as an option, in order to check if it works correctly.

[Florent_Guillau]

The ticket NXP-20934 has been fixed for 8.10 and the next 7.10 hotfix.