bash weirdness

[Ben Scott]

On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 2:02 PM, John Abreau <jabr at blu.org> wrote:
> I tried the various suggestions to no effect.
> "rpm -V bash" returns nothing.

  You may want to give "rpm -Va" to verify all packages.  It usually
takes a while, but it may be that some system library is screwed up.

> I enabled another LDAP user to be able to login to the server, and that
> user also exhibits the problem. Local users, including root, do not
> exhibit the problem.

  Sounds like maybe one of the NSS (name service switch) or PAM
(pluggable authentication module) libraries which provides user
information is screwed up or misconfigured.

> But why that would result in bash misbehavior is something that
> makes no sense to me.

  If getpwent() or other, similar library calls start failing, or
returning weird results, things can get very weird.  Think nasal
demons.  I haven't seen your described behavior, per se, but I've seen
other random stuff start acting weird when winbind was misconfigured,
or when the hostname was null.

-- Ben