bitcoind just hangs (no output at all)

I do realize that in the early stages bitcoin has to download a lot (How long does it take to download the blockchain?), however, I assume this is like wget or rsync where it displays the progress. Right now, when I issue the command bitcoind, it just hangs and outputs nothing. Could this be due to closed ports? Is it sufficient that I opened ports on my Ubuntu router, or must I forward those ports? Alternatively, is there a command line parameter I have to issue to get the output of bitcoind?

bitcoind

puk

Posted 2013-12-05T05:53:06.943

Reputation: 223

Answers

No output is normal, it's meant to be run as a daemon. If you want to see progress however, try bitcoind -printtoconsole or tail -f ~/.bitcoin/debug.log.

Anonymous

Posted 2013-12-05T05:53:06.943

Reputation: 1 330

You should be using something like so to run bitcoind as a daemon

bitcoind -daemon

And then, you can check on it like so:

bitcoind getinfo

Earlz

Posted 2013-12-05T05:53:06.943

Reputation: 980

All I get is "error: couldn't connect to server" – puk – 2013-12-05T09:18:44.033

Scratch that, it is magically working now. I guess it needed time... – puk – 2013-12-05T10:22:04.427

@puk yea, I forgot about that. Sometimes it can take a minute or two to warm up – Earlz – 2013-12-05T15:01:47.883

Newer builds use bitcoin-cli to connect to the daemon rather than commands with bitcoind. You can pass -rpcwait to this to stop calls failing when the daemon is still checking it's files and starting up. – Anonymous – 2013-12-05T15:21:12.920