Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
On 2006-07-11 09:09, Peter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I have the following in my .xinitrc file:
aterm -e screen &
What is happening is that neither /etc/profile nor ~/.profile are
being read. How can I get either of them to be sourced?
By default, xterm, rxvt, aterm and various other terminal emulators
start non-login shells. This means that .profile is not sourced by the
shell spawned by the terminal. You can enable a `login shell' inside
one of these terminal emulators with the -ls option:
aterm -ls -e screen &
But a better option, IMHO, is to correctly separate the functionality
in your .profile from that in some other (e.g. .shinit) file. One is
for only stuff that happens at login, one for stuff that happens regardless.
from man sh
When first starting, the shell inspects
argument 0, and if it begins with a dash (-), the shell is also
consid-
ered a login shell. This is normally done automatically by the
system
when the user first logs in. A login shell first reads commands
from the
files /etc/profile and then .profile if they exist. If the
environment
variable ENV is set on entry to a shell, or is set in the
.profile of a
login shell, the shell then reads commands from the file named in
ENV.
Therefore, a user should place commands that are to be executed
only at
login time in the .profile file, and commands that are executed
for every
shell inside the ENV file. The user can set the ENV variable to some
file by placing the following line in the file .profile in the home
directory, substituting for .shinit the filename desired:
ENV=$HOME/.shinit; export ENV
IMHO, this one one of the ways that csh was miles ahead of sh as a login
(as opposed to a scripting) shell. These days, of course, a modern
shell like bash has many of the best features of both, and even sh can
(finally) do command line editing.
--Alex
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