I had a user "fred" who could run IRAF just fine -- but I wanted to change his user name to "tom" while not changing the uid. Never mind why, but this is (or should be) straightforward enough -- edit the /etc/passwd file on a linux system, and rename the home directory from fred to tom.
After doing this, I try to start the cl and get:
Warning: Cannot delete file (uparm$tbthen.fits)
Warning: Attempt to delete a nonexistent file (uparm$tbthen.fits)
ERROR: cannot open `uparm$pipe12655' for writing
called as: `cl ()'
Error while reading login.cl file - may need to rebuild with mkiraf
Fatal startup error. CL dies.
I look in the uparm directory and there are no files with name "pipe*".
However, for some reason, I got the idea of looking in those mysterious world write-able directories in /iraf.
cd cache ls -al drwxrwxr-x. 2 tom tom 4096 Jun 18 13:48 fred drwxrwxr-x. 2 pilot pilot 4096 Jun 18 12:43 pilot drwxrwxr-x. 2 1000 1000 4096 Jun 14 16:29 tomHere we see at least part of the problem. IRAF had created named directories under the old uid scheme, but those directories are no longer owned by the uid that name now corresponds to. The same mess is going on over in "imdirs"
cd imdirs ls -l drwxrwxr-x. 2 1000 1000 4096 Jun 14 16:29 tomThings look OK for user pilot, but tom and fred will never be able to create files in these directories. For that matter, user fred does not exist anymore (at least not with the name fred). The easy fix is to just delete these bogus directories, they are empty. Fred is long gone, his directory may as well be too.
su cd /iraf/imdirs rmdir tom cd /iraf/cache rmdir fred tomAfter this, user "tom" needs to run mkiraf again, but after that everything is fine.
Tom's home page / tom@mmto.org