Setting DISPLAY in .bashrc on AIX doesn't work in at least one strange situation

 Here's what I tried in  my .bashrc:

DISPLAY=$(who am i | perl -pe 's/.*\((.*)\)/$1:0.0/')
export DISPLAY

Here's the result:

$ xterm

Warning: This program is an suid-root program or is being run by the root user.

The full text of the error or warning message cannot be safely formatted

in this environment. You may get a more descriptive message by running the

program as a non-root user or by removing the suid bit on the executable.

xterm Xt error: Can't open display: %s

xterm:  DISPLAY is not set

$ echo $DISPLAY

10.110.2.214:0.0
$ export DISPLAY=10.110.2.214:0.0

$ xterm

(xterm displays as expected)

This drove me crazy for longer than it should have. I even ran:

echo $DISPLAY | od -c

and that showed no extra characters at all. I was at my wit's end until I simply tried a different set of commands to set DISPLAY. The one that works is:

REMOTE_HOST_IP=$(who am i | awk '{print $NF}' | tr -d ')''(' )

DISPLAY=$REMOTE_HOST_IP:0.0

export DISPLAY

This is on AIX 7.3, with what I'm certain are strange and old versions of perl and bash (they behave oddly in other situations, too), but wanted to share my silly solution.