From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20021003 Description of problem: /etc/profile includes code like if [ `id -u` = 0 ] && ! echo $PATH | /bin/grep -q "/sbin" ; then PATH=/sbin:$PATH fi this will fail to add /sbin if, say, /usr/local/sbin is already in $PATH. it also requires /usr/bin to be in $PATH a priori. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. set PATH to /usr/local/sbin:/bin 2. run bash Actual Results: bash: id: command not found bash: id: command not found bash: id: command not found bash: [: too many arguments bash: tput: command not found bash: tput: command not found bash: wc: command not found bash: [: : integer expression expected bash: dircolors: command not found Additional info: I suggest to replace the code with something like this: prepend_path() { for elem do case :$PATH: in *:$elem:*) : ;; # already in PATH, do nothing *) PATH="$elem:$PATH" ;; esac done } prepend_path /usr/X11R6/bin /bin /usr/bin /usr/local/bin if [ $EUID = 0 ] then prepend_path /sbin /usr/sbin /usr/local/sbin fi this method uses no external processes, so it should be a tiny bit faster. $EUID is specific to bash, so you may not be able to use that, and have to fall back on id -un.
This is fixed in current packages.