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Broken backquote behavior in bash?



 I've got a server that's been giving strange errors lately. Most 
noticeably, when I login, 
I get several errors of the form 

    -bash: [: =: unary operator expected 

I've traced these to files under /etc/profile.d, and on further 
testing I find that the 
offending lines are using backquotes, e.g. 

        if [ `/usr/bin/id -u` = 0 ] ; then 

When I try to use backquotes on the command line on this server, I get 
no output. 
Even stranger, if I have a suspended vi job, then running something in 
backquotes 
terminates the vi process: 

    $ vi foo 
    ^Z 
    [1]+  Stopped                 nvi foo 
    $ echo `echo bar` 

    [1]+  Terminated              nvi foo 

If I do this on my other systems, I get 

    $ echo `echo bar` 
    bar 

and the vi job does not terminate. 

I've tried googling for these symptoms, but so far I haven't found a match. 
Has anyone else run across this odd behavior? What could be causing it? 



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