Ah, the perils of working in a shared, client environment. One client has us using a login that is not exclusive to us. I prefer using bash; the client is set to use zsh. This is not a problem in and of itself.

However, there is a section in the .profile that is causing me issues:

if [ -f /usr/bin/ksh ]; then
        /usr/bin/ksh -o vi
        exit
fi

So, “If ksh exists, run it with some options to edit history with vi-like commands”. Except what we really want is “If you’re using the ksh as a shell, . . . .”

So I added a modification, and now all is fine.

if [ -f /usr/bin/ksh ]; then
        if [ "$SHELL" = "/usr/bin/ksh" ]; then
                /usr/bin/ksh -o vi
                exit
        fi
fi

(not all my problems are MySQL related!)