[Systems] strange (to me) error when logging in

[David Farning]

I was setting up a user for activities-devel.sugarlabs.org and used
the following to create the user.
sudo useradd -c "Activites-devel owns the files for aslo-devel and
runs the cron jobs" -d "/srv/www-sugarlabs/activities-devel" -m
activities-devel

Now, when I sudo su - activities-devel i get the following error.

ulimit: 60: Illegal option -u
[: 72: 99: unexpected operator

and sudo activities gives me
\[\033[31m\]\u\[\033[36m\]@\[\033[1;44;33m\]\h\[\033[0;36m\]:\[\033[32m\]\w\[\033[36m\]$\[\033[0m\]

any thoughts?

david