why can't I su to root?

[Steve Anderson]

In article <447 at afsg.apple.com>, ron at afsg.apple.com (Ron Flax) writes:
> There is a fixed (working) version of tcsh in ~ftp/pub on
> afsg.apple.com.

I had also noticed that the OSU version of tcsh was broken. Thanks for
posting a fixed copy.

The tcsh on afsg.apple.com works fine, except for one thing: when I
login with this as my shell, it doesn't run my .login, apparently. The
same thing happens with bash as my login shell. Only when my default
shell is sh or csh is .login run.

Perhaps this is related to the fact that with bash as my shell, I
couldn't set the X11 screen depth to 8 in ~/.X11 as documented in the
manual. I fixed that by editing the basic X startup script, but I
shouldn't have had to. Is there some way in which shells other than
csh and sh are not being told about where a user's home directory is
at startup?  If so, how can I fix this? If not, what else might be
going on?

Steve Anderson

anderson at sapir.cog.jhu.edu
anderson at csli.stanford.edu