hi community, hi roman, i've found something concerning my...
so: why can i do "ls", "mkdir", "xterm", ... as root, but not as a normal user?
more strange things: "ps", "w", "less" and even "top" work ok, "cat" (!) crashes. "finger" runs perfectly, "who" crashes.
...problem: thanks to roman's "strace" hint, i could track this down to some problem with the locale. the strace showed that the basic difference between root / normal user runs of the above commands was that normal user runs tried to load a locale (suppose de_DE). after renaming "/usr/share/locale/locale.alias" (thus disabling the locale loader) now every command is perfectly functional again, from root as well as from normal accounts. i am not yet able to tell which part of the locale causes the problem, but maybe this information can help others as well. regards, michael balzer -- b&b computersysteme * kämperheide 10 * 58285 gevelsberg * germany fon +49 2333 913924 * fax +49 2333 913925 * http://www.bbcomp.de