Re: daft question

[Al Hudson <nospam [at] york.ac.uk>]

On Mon, 17 Jan 2000, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> Al> Nowt wrong with setting xterm as a login shell ;)
> It clutters up your finger display and confuses talk quite a bit.

This is true, but it doesn't affect most users really. I've seen more
people confused from wondering why commands in the 'global' file weren't
executed, than those confused as to why finger had so much stuff in..

> Al> The general rule is, of course, that /bin/sh will only read
> I dunno about /bin/sh, I haven't read the POSIX spec, but ...

I was thinking more of the behviour of bash, i.e. ln -s /bin/bash /bin/sh.
(Is that the right way around? I can never remember ...), kind of like
--posixlycorrect (don't know if bash takes that option, but you get what
I'm on about ;)

> Al> $HOME/.profile. /bin/bash will only read $HOME/.bashrc, and
> Al> '/bin/bash --login' will read both /etc/.bashrc and
> Al> $HOME/.bashrc.
> ... this is not what `man bash' will tell you:

It is, pretty much. The stuff I wrote was not meant to be exclusive of
bash_*. I treat */.profile as /bin/sh compatible scripts, and */(.)bashrc
as the true place for /bin/bash config. bash will read from profiles, but
(IMHO) it shouldn't, and I would invoke --noprofile 'as standard'.

Lots of files means more maintainence, and I don't see why that should be.
Apache is exactly the same - it requires (or, says it requires) 3 config
files. Which are actually the same file, but they do that for
compatibility with ancient artefact UNIX software. That's the kind of
thing that bugs me..

> And to further complicate matters, most distributions seem to proceed
> to source the rc files from profile files, and sometimes both source a
> common third file.

Yes. This also irks me ;))

Regards,

Alex.

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