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[John Abreau]

I've got a server that's been giving strange errors lately. Most
noticeably, when I login,
I get several errors of the form

    -bash: [: =: unary operator expected

I've traced these to files under /etc/profile.d, and on further
testing I find that the
offending lines are using backquotes, e.g.

        if [ `/usr/bin/id -u` = 0 ] ; then

When I try to use backquotes on the command line on this server, I get
no output.
Even stranger, if I have a suspended vi job, then running something in
backquotes
terminates the vi process:

    $ vi foo
    ^Z
    [1]+  Stopped                 nvi foo
    $ echo `echo bar`

    [1]+  Terminated              nvi foo

If I do this on my other systems, I get

    $ echo `echo bar`
    bar

and the vi job does not terminate.

I've tried googling for these symptoms, but so far I haven't found a match.
Has anyone else run across this odd behavior? What could be causing it?

The server with the broken behavior is running CentOS release 5.2,
and bash is bash-3.2-21.el5.


-- 
John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix
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