topic su - strange behaviour in Operating System - HP-UX

su - strange behaviour

Andrew Young_2 — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 11:58:14 GMT

Hi.

On my development server (ia64 hp-ux 11.31) su has suddenly started behaving quite strangely. Any scripts started with the -c option are losing the TZ environment variable. It appears that /etc/profile is not being run. Any suggestion as to what could be causing this?

In order to test this I have enabled SU_KEEP_ENV_VARS=HOME,SHLIB_PATH,TZ
in /etc/default/security but whether this is set or not seems to make no difference.

Thanks in advance.

Andrew Y

Re: su - strange behaviour

Pete Randall — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 12:03:47 GMT

"su" or "su -"?

Pete

Re: su - strange behaviour

Andrew Young_2 — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 12:33:41 GMT

Oops. Sorry.

su - myuser -c command

As listed below:

root@dev01[/root] #su - jss_test -c 'echo $TZ'

root@dev01[/root] #su jss_test -c 'echo $TZ'
SAST-2
root@dev01[/root] #su jss_test 'echo $TZ'
bash: echo $TZ: No such file or directory
root@dev01[/root] #su - jss_test
Bad planning on your part does not constitute a disaster on someone else's part.
/home/jss_test] echo $TZ
SAST-2
/home/jss_test] exit
logout
root@dev01[/root] #su jss_test
root@dev01[/root] #echo $TZ
SAST-2

Re: su - strange behaviour

Pete Randall — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 12:43:16 GMT

I have no idea whether the bash shell is supposed to execute any profile/login scripts on login or not - have you tried this with a different shell?

Pete