OpenSSL ca fails after password without error message

Question

I am trying to use a Root CA to sign a CSR for an Intermediate certificate and OpenSSL asks for my password and then after that nothing happens. No error message and no certificates are made. The command it is failing on is:

openssl ca -config rootca.cnf -extensions v3_intermediate_ca ^
  -days 730 -notext -md sha256 ^
  -in C:/Certificates/IntermediateCA/csr/intermediate.csr.pem ^
  -out C:/Certificates/IntermediateCA/public/intermediate.cert.pem

openssl responds with:

Enter pass phrase for C:/Certificates/RootCA/private/rootca.key.pem:

and when I enter the password, nothing happens after that.

A good answer to this question would have two parts:

1. What am I doing wrong?
2. How can I get error output for this issue?

Additional Details

Not sure if this is needed but here are some additional commands I am using to generate the rest of the Intermediate CA:

Creating Intermediate CA private key:

openssl genrsa -aes256 -out private/intermediate.key.pem 4096

Creating Intermediate CSR:

openssl req -config intermediateca.cnf -new -sha256 ^
  -key private/intermediate.key.pem ^
  -out csr/intermediate.csr.pem

rootca.cnf (the important parts):

[ CA_default ]
dir = C:/Certificates/RootCA
...
[ policy_strict ]
countryName             = match
stateOrProvinceName     = match
localityName            = match
organizationName        = match
organizationalUnitName  = optional
commonName              = supplied
emailAddress            = optional
...
[ req_distinguished_name ]
0.organizationName_default = org1
1.organizationName_default = org1.1
...
[ v3_intermediate_ca ]
subjectKeyIdentifier = hash
authorityKeyIdentifier = keyid:always,issuer
basicConstraints = critical, CA:true, pathlen:0
keyUsage = critical, digitalSignature, cRLSign, keyCertSign

Answer 1

openssl may be thinking your index.txt file is "corrupt". This same behavior happened to me when I was resetting my file with echo '' > index.txt while scripting some things out. Simply removing index.txt file and using touch index.txt to recreate it was enough to make openssl happy again.