Can't Figure out What I Did to Our Environment FreeBSD6.2. fixed

[Martin McCormick]

Roland Smith writes:
> Maybe the ownership and/or permissions of /usr/share/misc are wrong?

	I checked against another system that isn't having any
trouble and found the permissions to be exactly the same.  I
then ran strace -e trace=file to see what all it opens when
being run.

Bingo!

	It opens a file in one's home directory called .magic.
I had created a file called .magic in all our home directories
for a totally unrelated purpose, never dreaming that somebody
else was looking for that name.  It doesn't even need to exist
because file only uses it if it is there.  Since our .magic has
nothing that the file utility recognizes, it breaks.

	I named our .magic file to something else and everything
began to work perfectly.  The reason why some accounts worked
before and others didn't is that not every single account had
this rogue .magic file I had made for another purpose.

	Thanks for your help and my apologies for wasting your
time.