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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.
This is really bizarre... uhm, could it be one of the more important libraries that is linked to some binaries?!? Well, it can't be libc (everything would crash ;-)), but maybe libm, libstdc++ or whatever. Have you checked this? The ldd command (given that THIS works ;-)) should give you a list of linked libraries for a binary. So you can check ps, w, cat and so on and compare the lists of libraries. Regards, Jan Hildebrandt -- jan.hildebrandt@mathema.de MATHEMA Software GmbH (http://www.mathema.de) Nägelsbachstraße 25a D-91052 Erlangen, Germany Tel: (+49)9131/8903-0 Fax: (+49)9131/8903-55