Numeric User Gone Bad?

[Steve Holmes]

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Well, I don't like being the only one being able to demonstrate this
problem.  I dunno if rebooting will make a difference; Linux is
usually pretty consistent about things.  I honestly can't imagine why
a variable like that works at the command line but not inside a
shell.  Frankly, I've never experienced anything like this before.  I
upgraded to squeeze the other day (Friday) and never had any trouble
with these scripts until I came back into Linux last night and ran
talkwith this morning.

On Sun, Mar 01, 2009 at 06:54:49PM -0500, Chuck Hallenbeck wrote:
> Steve,
> 
> On my squeeze system, talkwith still works, and your test script gives
> me this:
> 
> Numeric user-id = 0
> Character user-id = root
> 
> So I wonder what's going on here?
> 
> Chuck
> 
> 
> On Sun, Mar 01, 2009 at 03:23:51PM -0700, Steve Holmes wrote:
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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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> > Speakup at braille.uwo.ca
> > http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> 
> -- 
> The Moon is Waxing Crescent (25% of Full)
> 
>                   My web site: www.hallenbeck.ftml.net
>                       See also: www.wedit2.ml1.net
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