[webmin-l] /bin/sh -c (hostname)

[Victor T. <vic...@gm...>]

A few weeks ago (I think after a webmin upgrade) I started noticing
there were processes that were taking up 100% CPU time.  I took the
output from top:

21093 root      25   0  4436  588  452 R 99.3  0.0 698:00.55 sh
23993 root      25   0  4440  592  452 R 59.6  0.0 463:17.77 sh
21757 root      25   0  4436  592  452 R 41.7  0.0 761:26.08 sh

then:

mercury ~ # ps -f 21093; ps -f 23993; ps -f 21757
UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY      STAT   TIME CMD
root     21093 21006 70 Dec11 ?        R    698:25 /bin/sh -c (hostname)
UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY      STAT   TIME CMD
root     23993 23922 50 Dec11 ?        R    463:30 /bin/sh -c (hostname)
UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY      STAT   TIME CMD
root     21757 21754 78 Dec11 ?        R    761:38 /bin/sh -c (hostname)
mercury ~ # ps -f 21006; ps -f 23922; ps -f 21754
UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY      STAT   TIME CMD
root     21006 18691  0 Dec11 ?        S      0:00
/usr/libexec/webmin/mailboxes/mail_search.cgi
UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY      STAT   TIME CMD
root     23922 18691  0 Dec11 ?        S      0:00
/usr/libexec/webmin/mailboxes/mail_search.cgi
UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY      STAT   TIME CMD
root     21754 18691  0 Dec11 ?        S      0:00
/usr/libexec/webmin/mailboxes/mail_search.cgi
mercury ~ # ps -f 18691
UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY      STAT   TIME CMD
root     18691     1  0 Dec11 ?        Ss     0:00 /usr/bin/perl
/usr/libexec/webmin/miniserv.pl /etc/webmin/miniserv.conf

I killed those offending processes, and remembered that earlier in the
day I was reading my mail through webmin, and the search function was
just stalling.  It would sit there a while but not actually return any
results.  The very next day, I noticed it was happening again:

mercury ~ # ps -f 4080
UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY      STAT   TIME CMD
root      4080  4067 97 Dec12 ?        R    1104:56 /bin/sh -c (hostname)
mercury ~ # ps -f 4067
UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY      STAT   TIME CMD
root      4067 18691  0 Dec12 ?        S      0:00
/usr/libexec/webmin/mailboxes/view_mail.cgi
mercury ~ # ps -f 18691
UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY      STAT   TIME CMD
root     18691     1  0 Dec11 ?        Ss     0:00 /usr/bin/perl
/usr/libexec/webmin/miniserv.pl /etc/webmin/miniserv.conf

Why is it running /bin/sh -c (hostname) and why is it hanging there at
100% CPU?  Has anyone experienced anything like this?  It seems as
though a sh process spawns every other day or so, and is directly
related to me using webmin to read my mail.  Any insight would be
greatly appreciated, as right now I just have to log into the server
every day and manually kill any sh processes.