Re: Where is $MAIL set? (login process)
On Tue, Jun 03, 2003 at 04:54:46PM +0100, Ben Kal wrote:
> The login process:
>
> The man pages of
> - login
> - xdm
> - bash or tcsh or any other shell you use
> are pretty clear about what happens (mostly what startup scripts they
> execute) under what circumstances. Issues to be aware of are:
> - xdm replaces login but does not set up the environment in exactly the same
> way as login does, in particular it does not set MAIL as you have found
> - the shell of an X terminal is not a login shell (the user is already
> logged in through xdm) so the startup scripts for login shells,
> /etc/profile and ~/.bash_profile in the case of bash, are not executed!
> This easily causes the environment of shells on virtual consoles to be
> radically different from the environment of shells in X terminals.
Yes, so now I'm sourcing those in my .xsession file.
> - environment variables have to be set only once and are inherited by all
> processes that are children of the login shell or the X session,
> but things like aliases and shell options have to be set every time
> a shell is started.
Good to know. (I'm still not clear about variables shown with "set",
but I'm sure that's just a google away...)
> To ensure that:
> - the environment is the same in all shells
> - on startup shells do not read more startup scripts than necessary
> I did the following:
> - put all settings of environment variables in /etc/profile and ~/.bash_profile
> - put all aliases and shell options in /etc/bash.bashrc and ~/.bahsrc
> - made /etc/profile source /etc/bash.bashrc
> - made ~/.bash_profile source ~/.bashrc
> - made ~/.xsession source both /etc/profile and ~/.bash_profile,
> after setting an environment variable that to /etc/profile and ~/.bash_profile
> signals that they have been sourced by ~/.xsession;
> in that case they do not need to source /etc/bash.bashrc resp. ~/.bashrc,
> and instead unset that environment variable.
Thanks, that's very helpful.
--
Bill Moseley
moseley@hank.org
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