peasthope@shaw.ca wrote: > Another puzzle. I have two Squeeze systems which are almost identical. > In both, my entry in /etc/passwd is the same and I added this line at > the end of ~/.profile. > > export EDITOR=vi Because .profile is the "generic" shell side of things it is better to use the generic EDITOR=vi export EDITOR than to use the more compact but newer combined form. If this were in your ~/.bash_profile then the newer form is definitely safe because only bash reads ~/.bash_profile. But ~/.profile is the "lowest common denominator" file for all Bourne-shell-like shells. You might notice that Debian's default file (/etc/skel/.profile) uses bash syntax inside of an if statement checking for bash for just that reason. > On one system "echo $EDITOR" confirms the setting. On the other system > the setting is absent. Where should I look to understand this? How are you logging into these two different machines? It is a long story but normally when logging in through a graphical display manager such as xdm/gdm/gdm3/kdm/lightdm then in that case the long story is that different distros do it differently and Debian hasn't by default been invoking the shell as a login shell and therefore when logging in this way the ~/.profile isn't sourced. I think it is a bug. The topic gets discussed here every so often. I can't remember if this has been fixed recently or not and no time to research it at this moment. Bob
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