kjk@PacBell.COM (Ken Keirnan) (09/25/89)
We recently installed the latest version of the Korn shell (ksh88b) on our
system (ISC V/386 3.2 UNIX 2.0.2) and began using the ENV environment
variable for the first time. For those that don't know, the ENV variable
can be set to the name of a file containing command aliases, shell functions
and other setup commands - things that cannot be exported through the shell
environment to subsequent shells. The ENV file is executed on every
invocation of a shell the same way /etc/profile or $HOME/.profile are
executed for the initial login shell. Anyway, on to our wierd behavior.
Without going through all our trials and tribulations, we discovered if
anything is output to the terminal from the "ENV" file such as via an echo
statement, all future attempts to use "uucp" or "uuto" result in:
"can't get status for file: xxxxxxx"
for each file being sent. We havn't tried every program on the system, but
the "ls" command has no problem stat()'ing the file. I don't have the source
for HDB uucp or I would have attempted to debug further. In our book, this
certainly represents strange program behavior. Looking at the KSH88b source
it appears that the ENV file is processed the same as /etc/profile or
$HOME/.profile, however, sending output to the terminal from these files
causes no problem at all.
We're baffled!
Has anyone else experienced behavior similar to this? Anyone got any
ideas (please, don't recommend we don't output anything to the terminal
from the ENV file :-)).
Ken Keirnan
Pacific Bell
--
Ken Keirnan - Pacific Bell - {att,bellcore,sun,ames,pyramid}!pacbell!pbhyf!kjk
San Ramon, California kjk@pbhyf.PacBell.COM