Numeric User Gone Bad?

[Steve Holmes]

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I noticed something lately, like this morning where the numeric
user-id ($UID) doesn't work inside of scripts anymore.  Has anyone
else noticed this? I'm running Debian Squeeze so I have the latest
package of espeak and so on.  I first noticed the problem in both
talkwith and speakupconf shell scripts.  If I echo $UID from a live
shell, I hear the numeric value as I would expect.  my normal account
is 1000 and when I echo it from root I hear 0.  But when I execute
this command in a shell script, the $UID field always comes up as an
empty string or null so the fore mentioned shell scripts error out.

Hear's a sample test script to try this on.
#!/bin/sh
# Test user id values
echo Numeric user-id = $UID
echo Character user-id = $USER

When I run this script, the second echo command works beautifully but
the first one puts out the string but the value of $UID is apparently
empty because it is omitted.
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