Hi,
We have a customer who is using SunOS on Sparc Workstations to run a test
station. Some time ago, we developed a number of test programs for this system
and we are now in the business of supporting them. These programs all run
inside their own environment and are written in a test specific language.
However, we needed to do something special for one of these programs so we
produced a small utility in C to interrupt the testing from inside a loop. At
the time, we knew little about Unix programming (because our coders are all
Windows folks), so this list gave me some pointers (especially Ralph).
This program has been in use regularly, but infrequently, ever since and has
been working fine. However, the customer has recently gone through an upgrade
program and the utility no longer works. They have new physical hardware, but
the old machine exhibits the same problem. The change is the version of the OS
which has gone from 5.7 to 5.8.
We asked them to list the contents of the directory that contains the binary,
and they got:
merlin:admin:>ls -la
total 42
drwxrwxrwx 2 admin mats 512 Feb 16 09:24 ./
drwxrwxrwx 13 root root 1024 Feb 23 07:05 ../
-rwxrwxrwx 1 admin mats 9373 Feb 16 09:24 checkforstop*
-rwxrwxrwx 1 admin mats 8942 Feb 16 09:24 startloopstop*
The user admin is listed as the account for installing software and he gets a
csh to use. I'm fairly unfamiliar with the csh, so I've had to feel my way
around using our reference machine (which is still running SunOS 5.7) to remind
myself what we did. Here is what I've found:
1. If I enter ./startloopstop, I get the small dialogue box which gives the
user control over the running program. When this is pressed a small file is
written to the local directory, which is the signal, via checkforloopstop, to
the running test program to exit the loop. This works fine for me. When the
customer tries to do this, he gets 'Permission denied' when he types
./startloopstop. What other things could prevent execution, bearing in mind the
file and directory permissionsseem to allow anyone to do anything?
2. If I open the passwd file, it tells me that the user called admin is a
member of the mats group with the following entry:
admin:x:500:1208: Administration Account for Installing Software: /home/:
/bin/csh
(the mats group has the ID 1208.)
2a. Does the x signify that the user has execute priveledge or is that something
else?
2b. If I type group mats I get permission denied, even when logged in as root.
Why is that? I understood that this is a valid command.
2c. There is a file called profile in /etc, is that relevant? It seems to be a
script. At the bottom of this file is the single line umask 022.
3. In a csh, how do I find where I am?
4. In a csh, should appropos work? I can do man apropos, but foobar anything
simply lists the paths that it has searched and failed to find man pages.
All help gratefully received.
--
Next meeting: Dorchester, Tue 2010-03-02 20:00
http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2645413
Chat: http://www.mibbit.com/?server=irc.blitzed.org&channel=%23dorset
List info: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/dorset
