[oclug] .bash_profile/.bashrc (was: Re: [oclug] set $PATH)

[Joe Burpee]

On Mon, Jul 14, 2003 at 00:11:52 -0400, Patrick Smith wrote:
> Joe Burpee wrote:
> > On Thu, Jul 10, 2003 at 05:56:44PM -0400, Patrick Smith wrote:
> >>If you log in to X through xdm, ~/.bash_profile doesn't get run,
> >
> > It should, since Xsession should be exec-ing a login shell.  (E.g.
> > RedHat's does.)  Distro?
> 
> I'm not using any distribution, but have a homebrew system with 
> everything compiled from source.  In particular, XFree86 4.3.0 with the 
> ati.2 drivers from gatos.
 
Thanks for the explanation.  IIRC the vanilla XFree86 startup stuff
comes with a recommendation that the administrator do some work on the
scripts, which I guess is what RedHat and other distros have done.

> There might be a case for exec'ing .xsession as a login shell. 
 
It seems more to the point to me that there's a trivial case for
exec-ing a _login_ shell at _login_ time.

> But this 
> isn't enough to get bash to source .bash_profile; the shell needs to be 
> interactive as well,
 
That's news to me.  Do you have a reference for that?

> and .xsession is not.
 
Well, since it's your script you could easily make it interactive with
`-i', if there were any need to do so.  But I don't see the need.
 
> >>One solution would be to have ~/.xsession source ~/.bash_profile.
> > 
> >This may be a bit unsafe since it causes the profile to be sourced
> >*after* the automatic sourcing of bashrc.  It seems tidier (assuming
> >Xsession is broken and you can't fix it) just to run a login shell in
> >~/.xsession, which at least gets the sourcing order right.
> 
> Since .xsession is not run interactively, I believe bash does sources 
> neither .bash_profile nor .bashrc automatically.
 
I'm still not sure why you're basing this on non-interactivity.  Since
your .xsession is not under a login shell, it seems pretty reasonable
that .bash_profile would not be sourced.  And sourcing of `rc' files
depends on switches and environment variables.  My only point was that
if the sourcing of bashrc (or perhaps some other script intended to
initialize a non-interactive shell) did occur implicitly (before the
first command in .xsession), then sourcing .bash_profile explicitly gets
things back-asswards.  I guess I could have been more precise.

> >>Another is to make .bash_profile a symbolic link pointing to .bashrc. 
> > 
> >Aiiieeeee.  I don't even want to think about that.
> 
> Actually, this is what I do, and was doing long before I started using 
> xdm.  In my case, it works really nicely.
 
In my case it wouldn't, but that's beside the point.  I just thought
that shell initialization was confused enough without muddying the
semantics further.  I guess I'm being a bit of a purist.  If it works
for you that's probably good enough.

Joe