[offtopic] Re: [PLUG] .profile

[Richard June]

Jonathan Sergent wrote:

> BTW, this is off topic.  I suggest that general Unix questions are
> probably better off on the one or more of the purdue.* newsgroups.
>
> /// HarleY <harley@quasar.ground.dynip.com>:
>  ]      I created my .profile in my home directory on expert.
>  ] The problem is that most things are working like the umask ect, but
>  ] I installed bash on expert and put it in my homedir.  I put a line in my
>  ] .profile that looks something like this
>  ] ~/bash -l
>  ] However bash doesn't exicute when I log in.  I think it may have to do
>  ] with the fact that bash isn't listed in /etc/shells.  Is there a way
>  ] around this?  I'd really like bash as my default shell.
>
> ~/ does not work with /bin/sh.  If your shell is /bin/sh, you will
> need to say $HOME.
>
> Also, you don't say "exec bash" and so once you exit bash, you will
> get back to your normal shell before you log out.
>
> And even worse, bash also reads .profile on startup, and this will
> send it into a loop, starting lots of processes.  Fortunately, you
> have a per-user process limit on expert, or you could easily crash
> a machine with this (bash is not small).
>
> Suggestion: chsh to csh and then make a ".login" that says:
>
> if ( "${TERM}" != "" ) then
>         setenv SHELL ${HOME}/bin/bash
>         exec ${HOME}/bin/bash -l
> endif
>
> This avoids the .profile problem since csh doesn't use it.
> The problem with _this_ is that if you use rsh, your commands get run
> by csh instead of an sh type shell, so some things won't work like they
> should.
>
> The setenv is important, or you may end up with csh for your subshells
> instead of bash.
>
> You can work this with some stuff in your .profile, but it tends to be
> shell-dependent (i.e. different between bash and ksh) and system-dependent
> (i.e. different between pdksh on Linux and ksh-88i on Solaris) to
> determine whether the shell you are running in is a login shell or
> a subshell of some sort.  It's possible, but tricky, and limits you
> from sharing your home directory and init files between architectures a
> bit more.  Personally, when I need to pull this kind of trick, I set my
> login shell to csh and do a .login as above.  You may need to fiddle a
> bit more if you intend to use CDE from the account you do this to.

couldn't he just do this in his .profile

if [1 -f  ${HOME}/tmp/login ]; then
  touch ${HOME}/tmp/login
  exec ${HOME}/bash -l
  rm ${HOME}/tmp/login
fi;