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From: dean@fyvie.cs.wisc.edu (Dean Luick)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Re: Error in SunOS4.1.1 /etc/rc
Keywords: su, uucp, /etc/rc, Sun
Message-ID: <1991Feb25.201609.26138@daffy.cs.wisc.edu>
Date: 25 Feb 91 20:16:09 GMT
References: <4132@gmdzi.gmd.de>
Sender: news@daffy.cs.wisc.edu (The News)
Organization: the Fell
Lines: 23

In article <4132@gmdzi.gmd.de> czech@gmdzi.gmd.de writes:
>              I get an error message:
>
> su: illegal option -- c
> 	usage: uucico [-xNUM] [-r[0|1]] -sSYSTEM -uUSERID -dSPOOL -iINTERFACE
>
>The problem is in the startup script /etc/rc. Here are the lines in question:
>
>		if [ -d /usr/lib/uucp ]; then
>			su uucp -c /usr/lib/uucp/uusched & \
>					echo -n ' uucp'

What the line is trying to do is run uusched as user uucp.  If you read the
man page for su, you will see that they say that su <login> -c <command> is
legal.  The program su starts the shell program for uucp (from /etc/passwd)
and hands it the "-c <command>" as an argument.  Unfortunately, the "shell"
for uucp is uucico, not the expected "regular" shell, like sh, csh, etc.
Consequently, uucico fails with the above error message.

A fix for this is a fake user, say uucp-adm, that has the uucp uid and gid,
but has a "regular" shell.

dean