Getting a string value out of a text file with the "<" character doesn 't work, it just returns an empty value. F.i. "echo $(</var/run/atd.pid)" gives nada (not even an error), whereas in other distributions, like Mandrake, it gives you the contents of the file. As a workaround you can use "cat" or something, but it 's bit stupid and slower to call a binary to do this. I 've tested this on RH 6.0 and RH 6.2. I 've tried to track it down with "strace", but it doesn 't return any value either.
This is a bash 2.x specific feature. It's fixed in rawhide by the upgrade to bash 2.04.