I've done a little reading and it appears /etc/environment is indeed a
configuration file for Linux-PAM
man PAM ("PAM" must be in capitals "pam" is something else)
Also had a look at Linux-PAM System Administrators Guide
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/libs/pam/Linux-PAM-html/sag-pam_env.html
which states that pam_env.so passes the lines in /etc/environment
So when is the pam_env.so loaded?
PAM configuration is in /etc/pam.d/ or /etc/pam.conf (the latter is ignored if
the former is present) My Ubuntu system (10.4 upgraded from 6.4) uses
/etc/pam.d/
Of the files in this directory atd, cron, gdm, gdm-autologin, login & su
require pam_env.so so, going by the names of these config files, I'm guessing
that pam_env.so, which loads /etc/environment, is run when gdm is started and
at login, perhaps even when cron and atd are run?
I can confirm that /etc/environment is read and the variables set at
login and/or su login, but I don't have time right now to test cron or
atd, and don't know how to test gdm or gdm-autologin
Hope this helps answer the original question somewhat but I agree it
would be nice to know how to execute pam_env.so manually.
One limitation to /etc/environment though is that it is NOT a shell script - it
is a config file - and therefore putting the following doesn't work:
scripts_path='/mnt/config/scripts'
start_stop_scripts="$scripts_path/start-stop"
script_logs="$scripts_path/script_logs"
this results in
echo $script_logs
$scripts_path/script_logs
rather than
echo $script_logs
/mnt/config/scripts/script_logs
For this reason I'll probably just put
source /mnt/config/scripts/myenvar
at the end of /etc/bash.bashrc even though
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EnvironmentVariables says it's not
recommended. Then include all my custom global variables in
/mnt/config/scripts/myenvar
P.S. I can see why Debian has decided to separate out local variables
from /etc/environment as it's not very intuitive to set environment
variables through an authentication system. I hope the trend continues
and we'll eventually get a standard set of configuration files that all
(or at least all compliant) programs reference. :-)
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/18574
Title:
/etc/environment lacks man page.
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