Re: .bash_profile, the empty /etc/skel, and the first user
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On Sun, 15 Dec 1996, Lars Wirzenius wrote:
> [ Please don't Cc: me when replying to my message on a mailing list. ]
>
> Santiago Vila Doncel:
> > (3) I don't understand the policy of having /etc/skel totally empty.
>
> What useful settings would you like to put there that are not better
> done elsewhere? Remember, if you add a setting to /etc/skel, then only
> new users will get it.
I don't want to *add* things to /etc/skel. I want these things to be there
from the beginning :-), just before creating that silly mandatory first
new user.
Useful settings that may go in /etc/skel:
* Alias for colorized ls. This would be commented out, so that any user
would be able to uncomment some lines of their .bashrc to get color with
ls without asking the system administrator (or doing it from scratch). Or
viceversa: Put aliases directly, so that every user not wanting to see
colors would be able to comment out the lines.
* The line "export LC_CTYPE=ISO-8859-1". Of course, some users would
prefer ISO-8859-2, but ISO-8859-1 is a good starting point. Comment out
this line if you just want to make it a "suggestion".
* A line like "export LANG=en", maybe with a comment saying "Change this
to the ISO code of your language". This will make all newer i18n GNU
programs to talk our own language. With a line like this in the default
.bashrc file, users would only have to change "en" by "fi", for example.
Without *any* line like this, users would have to ask the system
administrator. Even worse: maybe they would never know that they could do
that.
* A line like export PS1; PS1='\h:\w\$ ' so that user will know
always which is the current directory. This would be a suggestion, of
course, but it is much better than nothing. (Even Microsoft has a better
default value ($P$G in MS-DOS) than nothing!).
Do you want more examples?
[ Would you put LANG=en in /etc/profile? It would be useless there! ]
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Santiago Vila <sanvila@ctv.es>
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