Re: strange su behaviour

[Nick Murtagh]

On Saturday 02 March 2002 09:08, Ville Herva wrote:
> Well, you could try to strace it to see where it lurks when it hangs.

The -r did the trick. Basically there was a bug in pam_xauth where it
was calling ftruncate with an un-initialised off_t length. Hence it
was trying to ftruncate a 34 byte file to > 100 megabytes. 

The ftruncate manpage says that the behaviour in this circumstance is
undefined. I will investigate further to see why different kernel
versions are acting differently here.

Thanks for your help.

Nick