Re: Bash Session

[Andrew Reid <reidac@bellatlantic.net>]

On Saturday 25 April 2009 22:24:15 Kurian Thayil wrote:
> Hi Andrew,
>
> I guess parsing /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow file and sending an email
> notification is a good one. But don't you think, that .bashrc concept and
> inclusion of tasks in it will be quite confusing and complicated for a
> beginner? I will have to explain about login and non-login shell, startup
> scripts which will make them more confusing. Don't you think?

  Well, you know your audience better than I do, of course, so 
you may well be right.
 
  My motivation for thinking that .bashrc is a good place to start
is that it's the one place where, if you want to customize at 
that level, there's really no alternative to using bash scripting.

  The same is true of the system init scripts, but those
are definitely too scary for scripting beginners.

  For everything else (even cron, etc.), there's always an 
alternative -- you could write a custom program in another
scripting or compiled language to do what you want, but in the
.bashrc, bash-scripting is really the only way to do anything.

  There wasn't any more profound idea to it than that.

				-- A.
-- 
Andrew Reid / reidac@bellatlantic.net