I had some comments from the other bug reports I file which led me to do
some more testing. Here's what I found.
I've had three packages with this issue - spamassassin, sa-compile and
tuptime.
The user for spamassassin and sa-compile is debian-spamd whose shell is
set to /bin/sh. The user for tuptime is tuptime whose shell is also set
to /bin/sh. No other users on my system use /bin/sh.
Changing the shell to /bin/bash for tuptime for example, eliminates the
error with using 'su -'.
Aliases present no problem. Functions, depending on how they are
written, do.
function somefunction () {....} causes a problem.
function somefunction {....} causes a problem.
somefunction () {....} does not. Using the reserved word 'function'
causes /bin/sh to throw an error.
Interestingly, when using the reserved word function, the presence of ()
changes the error message.
With the use of ():
-sh: 5: /etc/profile.d/test.sh: Syntax error: "(" unexpected (expecting
"fi")
Without the use of ():
-sh: 5: /etc/profile.d/test.sh: function: not found
Definitely would have been much easier to spot the error had we not used ().
So while calling a login shell caused a problem, ultimately, it's
because /bin/sh does not recognise the reserved word 'function'. I'm not
sure there's a good solution for this. It seems to be such a specific
issue. Had I not created a user with a /bin/sh shell and tried to
recreate the function for that user, I'm not sure I would have twigged
that the reserved word function was causing the problem since the error
kept coming back as the ( causing the issue.
Thanks.
--
Terry
