On 2017-10-17 at 11:49, Greg Wooledge wrote: > On Tue, Oct 17, 2017 at 11:44:20AM -0400, The Wanderer wrote: > >> The /etc/environment setting only specifies the default >> environment; in order to make it take effect, you'd have to >> reboot. > > No, you just have to login again (or trigger whatever else you're > doing that uses the pam_env module). Unless this is yet another > thing where GNOME breaks unix. Hmm. Okay, I'll admit that I didn't specifically test this - but I'm used to launching things from a WM menu, and that inherits environment from the WM, which inherits it from either X or the ~/.xinitrc which gets invoked (eventually) from startx, which inherits it from the console where I logged in in the first place. Resetting that environment would seem to require shutting down X and re-launching it, and probably logging out at that console and logging back in before the re-launch, and by the time I've closed things down that far I'm close enough to fully shut down that I might as well reboot (to pick up kernel updates, etc.) anyway. And since most people use GUI login nowadays, which AFAIK involves X getting invoked even before login occurs, I would have expected that even logging all the way out wouldn't be enough to get the X environment fully reloaded. It's entirely possible that nothing in my stack except /bin/login itself (if even that) draws on PAM at all. > Of course, /etc/environment is basically useless for anything > complex, because you can't pull shell parameter expansions in it. > Only constant strings. Noted, but it does seem to work well for this purpose. Is there an obvious place where this file is documented? 'man environment' is the only thing that springs to my mind, barring Google searches, and that turns up no entries. -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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