Thanx to olly,
when he mentionned a possible mistake to do with redirection I pretty much guessed what that the problem was. In the file /etc/profile I have an alias that runs the following command: alias upD.='updatedb --prunepaths="/var /cdrom /tmp /proc /mnt" > /dev/null 1>&2 \' This particular alias is I think OK, but I noticed that when I modified it slightly (by taking the '&' away) and called it from a normal user account it produced the file '2 ' and the text I found so worrying. No doubt I ran the alias in the past when it wasn't correctly written. T: per_adua32
