Suvayu and Ed:
Thanks for these replies. Points taken as they help me see the
weaknesses in my understanding. So, yeah, I got hacking / homework ahead
... and seeing if I can figure out enough to feel comfortable learning /
switch to bash from tcsh.
Paul
Suvayu Ali wrote:
Hi Paul,
On Monday 28 December 2009 09:21 PM, Paul Allen Newell wrote:
Ed Greshko wrote:
The man page tells you under what conditions the various files
(/etc/profile, ~/.bash_profile ~/.bash_login etc) are read depending on
what type of shell (interactive, login).
Are you saying there is a situation not covered?
Remember, everything that is executed is executed under a shell.
I think part of my confusion is that I am not understanding whether a
login shell covers everything that is done once I have logged in via
splash screen or if it is confined to "logining into a shell". If the
former, then I would assume bash_profiles is hit once and everything
done thereafter would be under its command. If the latter, then I am
probably unclear about whether launching a terminal is a "login" act
(hence under bash_profile only within that shell).
I think a small experiment is in order. Open up any terminal emulator
of your choice, go fullscreen (well just stretching it to be really
big should be enough for the experiment ;) )
Now run the following,
$ ps uf -u `whoami`
The output might be a little truncated on the right depending on the
size of your monitor, but that is not too important. As you can see,
the command to start your desktop is initiated by a shell. So if you
setup your environment variables appropriately, then all those should
be available to the shell starting your desktop. This allows you to
have a consistent environment for your applications no matter how you
launch them, from a terminal or from the gui of your desktop.
The lesson to learn here are the differences between shells/apps
inheriting the environment of its parent shell/process depending on
how you set the environment.
If you are interested, you can try another small experiment to see for
yourself what I mean. Try putting this in your ~/.bash_profile,
export PATH=$PATH:${HOME}/bin
And then put a symbolic link to some small application of your choice
in your ${HOME}/bin.
For example I did this, (I chose thunar as I use XFCE)
$ ln -s -T `which thunar` ${HOME}/bin/fakethunar
Now logout and log back in. Try running `fakethunar' with the Alt-F2
dialogue. It will open up thunar. Now comment out those lines, logout,
login again and repeat that. You will get an error message. You can do
many different variations of this to explore some more subtleties. But
I think this paints a clearer picture now. :)
Paul
Have fun hacking.
PS: This kind of info is usually in the FILES or INVOCATION section of
the man pages.
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