Absolutely right. You are the winner. This is a remote server I'm using for video encoding. For various odd reasons it's necessary to ssh in as root, and then su. If I su - user all works.

We've done this for years. It was only with the upgrade to Fedora 20 (and perl-5.16 -> perl-5.18) did we have the problem.

Thanks for all the help. I'd never have figured this out on my own.