Obscure problem with Bash when printing

[James Richard Tyrer]

I have been advised of a serious problem when printing in Linux using a 
spooler/filter when printing a PostScript file that does not have the fonts 
embedded.

I am using GNUlpr.  The daemon: "lpd" (running as root) calls the: 
"master-filter" script (running as the user that submitted the job) which 
calls GhostScript (as the user that submitted the job).

The problem is that when GhostScript is called that the environment 
strings: GS_LIB and GS_FONTPATH are not set.  The fix for this appeared to 
be to make the: "master-filter" script a login script so that: "profile" 
would be run before GhostScript was called.  This worked for fonts 
installed system wide -- providing that they were properly configured to 
work with GhostScript and that the search paths were set correctly.

However, if the path set by: "profile" (in a 'profile.d' script on my 
system) is in HOME (e.g. $HOME/.fonts), it doesn't work. :-(  I find that 
the problem is that for some reason that HOME is being set to: '/' rather 
then: "/home/$USER".  The odd thing is that (sticking echo statements in 
the: "master-filter" script) `id -un` reports the correct user name.

This appears to be set incorrectly in this code in: "shell.c":

void
get_current_user_info()
{
  struct passwd *entry;

  /* Don't fetch this more than once. */
  if(current_user.user_name == 0)
    {
      entry = getpwuid(current_user.uid);
      if(entry)
        {
          current_user.user_name = savestring(entry->pw_name);
          current_user.shell = (entry->pw_shell && entry->pw_shell[0])
                                ? savestring(entry->pw_shell)
                                : savestring("/bin/sh");
          current_user.home_dir = savestring(entry->pw_dir);
        }
      else
        {
          current_user.user_name = savestring("I have no name!");
          current_user.shell = savestring("/bin/sh");
          current_user.home_dir = savestring("/");
        }
      endpwent();
    }
}

I'm not sure exactly what is happening here but: "current_user.uid" appears 
to get set to the value returned by: "getuid()" in: "uidget()", but is it 
executed?

So, the question is, if "getuid()" reports the correct user, should HOME be 
correctly set to the home directory for that user?  And, if not -- which is 
the case here -- is this a bug in Bash?

--
JRT