[Techtalk] winmodem hsfconfig problem

[Dominik Schramm]

Hi again,

"Gebhard Dettmar" <gebhard.dettmar at student.hu-berlin.de> writes:

> It's a shell-script, so the shebang is:
> ---snip---
> #!/bin/sh
> [...]

Hmm, I would have expected something more exotic.

> I don't understand this. I'm not familiar with shellscripts but
> according to my /etc/profile the bash should perform it.

You're /etc/profile has nothing to say in this matter. 
The script is executed by /bin/sh, which sometimes is a symbolic link
to e.g. /bin/bash.
You can force execution by /bin/sh by using
  "sh -c /usr/sbin/hsfconfig"

or force execution by /bin/bash with
  "bash -c /usr/sbin/hsfconfig"

However...

>> [...] useful for the list to further tackle the problem:
>>
>> 1. the permissions of "hsfconfig" (ls -la /path/to/hsfconfig)
>> 2. the first few lines of this file
> 
> permission is 754

Okay, and the owner and group of hsfconfig?

Suppose this is what "ls -la" gives you:
$ ls -la /usr/sbin/hsfconfig
-rwxr-xr--    1 root     root      1111 Feb 29 2000 hsfconfig

When trying to execute hsfconfig, are you either root
(or whatever user the ls command tells you; probably root if hsfconfig
is in /usr/sbin) or member of the group root (or whatever group you 
see)?
If not, then you are a member of the "others", who don't have 
execute permission.

Another possibility -- although the error message you're getting
doesn't point into that direction -- is that somewhere in the 
script a command is called which doesn't exist. 
You could find that out by inserting a line "set -x" into the
script near the top -- this turns on "debugging", so any command
is echoed to stdout before being executed.

I'm slowly running out of hints...

regards,
dominik