Whenever I su to a user and provide the environment tag:

'su - <user>'

I get this message:

/dev/pts/1: Operation not permitted

Without the tag (-) the message does not appear.

I just set up a new user with all the defaults and this keeps
happening.

Is there any way around this? I'm using 10.2.

Peter wrote :
>
> 'su - <user>'
>
> I get this message:
>
> /dev/pts/1: Operation not permitted
>
From 'man biff':
"su(1), and biff don't seem to get on too well. This is probably due to
the tty still being owned by the person using su. This can result in
``Permission denied'' messages when attempting to change the biff status
of your session.
>
> Is there any way around this? I'm using 10.2.
>
You can cqomment out these tree lines in /etc/profile:
if [ -x /usr/bin/biff ]; then
biff n
fi
--
Thomas O.

This area is designed to become quite warm during normal operation.

Thank you very much. That did it.

As people may have noticed, I am sending in numerous posts. This
machine has been doing everything well I haven't had to interact with
it much. Now that I am beginning to interact with it again, I am
noticing a pile of warts that need cleaning. Thanks to everyone who
helped (although I'm still working on the man latency issue).

--
Peter

On Thu, 16 Feb 2006 13:16:40 -0800, Peter wrote:

> Thank you very much. That did it.

However 'biff n' disables mail notification for any login shell...
A test for the current tty/pty owner should workaround that though:

TTY=`tty`
if [ `ls -l $TTY |cut -d' ' -f4` != $USER ]; then
biff n
else
biff y
fi

( Or just bitbucket the stderr filehandle instead, like: 2>/dev/null .)

--
-Menno.

Menno Duursma wrote :
>
> However 'biff n' disables mail notification for any login shell...

Thats the default setting for Slackware, and thats what effect the error
message when using 'su - user', and changing it to "biff y" wont help.
--
Thomas O.

This area is designed to become quite warm during normal operation.

On Fri, 17 Feb 2006 23:26:41 +0100, Thomas Overgaard wrote:
> Menno Duursma wrote :
>>
>> However 'biff n' disables mail notification for any login shell...
>
> Thats the default setting for Slackware, and thats what effect the error
> message when using 'su - user', and changing it to "biff y" wont help.

How about the code i posted though?

--
-Menno.

Menno Duursma wrote :

> How about the code i posted though?

Doesn't change anything. Its a bug in either biff or su, they don't cope
very well.
--
Thomas O.

This area is designed to become quite warm during normal operation.

On Sat, 18 Feb 2006 10:33:56 +0100, Thomas Overgaard wrote:
> Menno Duursma wrote :
>
>> How about the code i posted though?
>
> Doesn't change anything.

It should!
(Problem could be your $LANG setting before executeing the 'ls -l' there).

> Its a bug in either biff or su, they don't cope very well.

Nonsense. There is no "bug" with either. It's just that after a 'su' the
parent shell still owns our tty (look at the output of 'pstree -p -u'),
which implys one still gets the mail notification of the initial login
rather then for the id changed to.

--
-Menno.

On Sat, 18 Feb 2006 10:56:37 +0100, Menno Duursma wrote:
> On Sat, 18 Feb 2006 10:33:56 +0100, Thomas Overgaard wrote:
>> Menno Duursma wrote :
>>
>>> How about the code i posted though?
>>
>> Doesn't change anything.
>
> It should!

Maybe you like this snipped better then:

# Notify user of incoming mail. This can be overridden in the user's
# local startup file (~/.bash.login or whatever, depending on the shell)
if [ -x /usr/bin/biff ]; then
if [ -x /usr/bin/tty ]; then
TTY=`/usr/bin/tty`
fi
if [ "`ls -l $TTY |cut -d' ' -f4`" == "$USER" ]; then
echo "Enabling mail notification for user $USER: /usr/bin/biff y"
/usr/bin/biff y
fi
fi

--
-Menno.

Menno Duursma wrote :

> Maybe you like this snipped better then:

Hell yeah, that did the trick.
--
Thomas O.

This area is designed to become quite warm during normal operation.