Comment 33 for bug 336684

If you check the very first line of the logs, you see this when running as regular user:

execve("/usr/bin/cuneiform", ["/usr/bin/cuneiform", "-f", "hocr", "-l", "ger", "-o", "/tmp/scan/ocr.hocr", "/tmp/scan/out1.tiff"], [/* 13 vars */]) = 0

For root you get this:

execve("/usr/bin/cuneiform", ["/usr/bin/cuneiform", "-f", "hocr", "-l", "ger", "-o", "/tmp/scan/ocr.hocr", "/tmp/scan/out1.tiff"], [/* 34 vars */]) = 0

That is, it gets executed with a different set of parameters. I have no idea what those do. Does root get different protections or permissions? Also note line 6:

open("/etc/ld.so.cache", O_RDONLY) = 3

versus

open("/etc/ld.so.cache", O_RDONLY) = 0

Why does it get a different file descriptor?

One more thing to try is running CF as root by itself from script. Create the following script:

#!/bin/bash -x
/usr/bin/cuneiform -f hocr -l ger -o /tmp/scan/ocr.hocr /tmp/scan/out1.tiff

(CF command taken from your earlier post.)

And run it as root. This should tell us if the crash is caused by Bash or by something else.