non-displayable characters returned using "su - logonid -c string"

[Scott Lindstrom_2]

I need to 'su' to a user in a script and use the 'which' command to find which version of a file the user runs. But when I do the following I also get some non-displayable characters returned.

su - patrol -c "/usr/bin/which PatrolAgent"|grep PatrolAgent|cat -vet

returns:

^M^[[3g^M ^[H ^[H ^[H ^[H ^[H ^[H ^[H ^[H ^[H ^[H ^[H ^[H ^[H ^[H ^[H ^[H ^[H^M/application/patrol/3.6/PatrolAgent$

I need to just get the path and program name. I have tried various combinations using 'tr' but still am having trouble:

su - patrol -c "/usr/bin/which PatrolAgent"|grep PatrolAgent|tr -cd "[:alnum:]"

gets me:

3gHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHapplicationpatrol36PatrolAgent

so that's no good. Any thoughts on another way to extract the contents of the which command?

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Scott:

Don't use 'su -' which causes your profile to be sourced (read). Instead use:

# su patrol -c "..."

Regards!

...JRF...

[Jim Walls]

Presumably PatrolAgent is located somewhere in the target user's PATH - which is defined in the user's .profile. If this is the case then you would, normally, have to use "su -" otherwise PatrolAgent wont be found.

You could try the following:

su patrol -c '. ~patrol/.profile;/usr/bin/which PatrolAgent'

This will execute the .profile without setting up a whole new environment.

NB: White space between "." and "~patrol"

[Jim Walls]

Hmmm! Sorry, that doesn't appear to help!

However, the non-printable characters are emitted by the "tabs" command.... which is probably present in the user's .profile to set up the terminal's tab-stops for interactive working.

Try commenting out the "tabs" line in the .profile

This may cause unexpected behaviour if the user logs in to an interactive session.

[Steven Schweda]

> Try commenting out the "tabs" line in the
> .profile

Or making it conditional on talking to a real
terminal. (What does "tty" say in this
environment?)

[Scott Lindstrom_2]

James, Jim - I do need to source the profile so I can set the the PATH.

[Scott Lindstrom_2]

Jim, Stephen - let me look into the profile and see about the tabs.

[Scott Lindstrom_2]

It appears removing the tabs command (which the user does not need) will solve my problem. I will post more after I can test some more.