Using TR command like this:

echo Test | tr [A-Z] [a-z]

... with Bourne shell. Worked OK for a bunch of users on same server, suddenly, it does not work anymore for 1 particular user.

I do not see any differences between this user and other ones. When it fails, he just displays : "Test"

For the other users, he displays "test"

What's wrong ?

try:
echo Test | tr [:upper:] [:lower:]

maybe it's a different shell? what does "echo $0" say?

The shell is not different, both have /usr/bin/bash as shell, checked that as first thing.

If I use syntax:

echo Test | tr [:upper:] [:lower:]

... I'm getting "Bad String", on the user that does work, if you do :

echo Test | tr [upper] [lower]

I'm gessing that the TR command is just buggy, but I would like somebody to confirm this. There's obviously an external factor, deciding on the behaviour of this command, which should not be.

Does it help to place quotes around the tr arguments:

echo Test | tr "[A-Z]" "[a-z]"

That works perfectly, Thanks

Can you explain why it sometimes works without the quotes ?

I'm running these tr tests on a Solaris 9 unix box. Both examples work fine, but the Solaris tr MAN pages examples exclusively use quotes around the tr arguments.

Until I saw your post, I had never heard of not using quotes. I looked in my favorite Unix reference - Unix in a Nutshell - and this reference exclusively uses quotes.

If I were you, I'd exclusively use quotes as obviously without quotes tr usage is inconsistent.

OK Thanks,
I'm using Solaris 10 by the way

I need to updat all my scripts now, because otherwise it does not run for this one unix-user only, since some days, for an unknown reason