Re: Color-ls package nearly ready for release, but I need... (fwd)

[Shawn Asmussen <shawn@nfinity.com>]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 15 Mar 1996 05:57:08 -0600 (CST)
From: Shawn Asmussen <shawn@nfinity.com>
Subject: Re: Color-ls package nearly ready for release, but I need...



On Fri, 15 Mar 1996, Richard Kettlewell wrote:

> >I believe that color ls comes with a program called dircolors or something
> >like that. Then you typically run eval `dircolors` in your .profile and
> >vdir gets aliased to ls -li.
> 
> Can this be made to work for all possible shells?  What if you run one
> of these programs from a cron job or in a shell script and .profile
> hasn't been run?

Well, as long as the variables set by dircolors are exported, ls should 
behave correctly in shell scripts, and I believe eval works the same 
under csh and other shells, so it can be set regardless of what shell the 
user is using. eval `dircolors` is the standard way to set those things 
according to the man page for color ls. As far as a cron job goes, I 
suppose you would just need to make sure that the proper values are set 
within the cron job, either with an eval `dircolors` in the right places, 
or by specifying the correct options manually, and not relying on the 
eval to do it for you.

> >The only way is to make the executable perform differently based on
> >the way it is called, like the way sz sb and sx are all hardlinks to
> >the same executable, or to make vdir a shell script. I prefer the way
> >it's currently handled with the aliases.
> 
> I'm generally against putting anything extra in profiles as mine takes
> too long to run already l-)

Well, one eval isn't going to pump up .profile execution too much, and as 
that's the way it is designed to work, I think that going that way would 
be the best way to go.

						Shawn