drg (10/12/82)
The su command will fail silently with an exit code of 1 in the following
case:
a) The user you are su-ing to uses the csh.
b) Your current directory is unreachable by him.
The problem is in an undocumented routine called getwd() in the -ljobs
library, apparently used only by the csh to set the $cwd variable. The
getwd() routine will exit with a message on stderr if it can't open
one of the directories along your current path. Unfortunately, the csh
has already closed stderr before calling getwd(), so the message does
not come out.
The fix is to replace all exit(1) statements in getwd() by return("/").
This means that the csh will have $cwd wrong, but at least it won't
exit mysteriously. Re-build the -ljobs library, and re-compile the csh.