Re: Using setenv DISPLAY

[Andrew Cady <d@jerkface.net>]

On Mon, Mar 06, 2006 at 08:08:35AM -0500, Haines Brown wrote:
>
>   $ env | grep DISPLAY. 
>   DISPLAY=:0.0
> 
>   $ sudo env | grep DISPLAY
>   [nothing returned]
> 	
> Why do I get inconsistent results?

As others have pointed out, sudo does not by default preserve its
environment when starting privileged processes.  To get X working, you
will want to have sudoers retain both DISPLAY and XAUTHORITY.

>   # sudo setenv DISPLAY teufel:0
> 
> but I get the error, "command not found". Shouldn't it be accessible
> from a bash prompt when using sudo?

setenv is not an external command such as can be launched by sudo, but
a csh builtin. export is a bourne shell builtin; it will not work like
this either.  To use shell builtins to export, you must do something
like this:

sudo sh -c "DISPLAY=$DISPLAY XAUTHORITY=$XAUTHORITY xterm"