Re: /etc/environment

[Brad <lists@anomie.dhis.org>]

On Wed, 23 Jun 1999, Frank Barknecht wrote:

> stick@richnet.net hat gesagt: // stick@richnet.net wrote:
> 
> > What if /etc/environment comprised of a series of variable=value statements
> > that each shell would read and use to set the environment?  Doing it that
> > way would require each shell maintainer to modify some of their scripts once
> > and only once and for someone to write a reasonable default /etc/environment.
> > We could quite easily expand it to allow for ~/.env[ironment] in order to
> > make user specific changes centralized as well.  Of course someone would have
> > to write a policy guideline to issure that any new shells would conform to
> > this new standard, but it wouldn't be that big of a deal, IMO.
> 
> I would like to add that ssh also reads /etc/environment and expects
> name=value pairs there only. So if you have lines like:
> 
> PAGER=less
> export PAGER
> 
> in /etc/environment, ssh complains about a bad syntax with this:
> 
> Bad line in /etc/environment:  export PAGER
> 
> So even though I only use bash on my system, I can't easiliy keep
> environment-vars in  /etc/environment without getting ugly warnings by ssh.

i think the original proposal was that /etc/environment would only contain
name=value pairs. Each shell would parse this file (via a script in
/etc/profile or whatever default) to insert all those pairs into the
shell's environment. This way, /etc/environment would work with any shell
instead of just bash.