Build fails with 'process apparently never started' error

Article ID:360029374071
1 minute readKnowledge base

Issue

Builds may sometimes fail with the error process apparently never started in <PATH>. This seems to be most common with shell steps.

Example Log Output:

[candid] Running shell script
process apparently never started in /home/jenkins-home/workspace/Multibranch-Pipeline-master/agent_tmp/durable-b23fe10b

The aforementioned pipeline console output can correspond to Exit logs. The below log message can be found in $JENKINS_HOME/jobs/<JOB_NAME>/builds/<BUILD#>/workflow/flowNodeStore.xml:

<detailMessage>script returned exit code -2</detailMessage>
<stackTrace>
<trace>org.jenkinsci.plugins.workflow.steps.durable_task.DurableTaskStep$Execution.check(DurableTaskStep.java:341)</trace>
<trace>org.jenkinsci.plugins.workflow.steps.durable_task.DurableTaskStep$Execution.run(DurableTaskStep.java:294)</trace>

Resolution

Make sure that the Durable Task Plugin is up to date for your version of Jenkins. To resolve the example errors above, an update from 1.25 to 1.28 resolved the issue.