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Re: A .profile puzzle

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On Sunday 17 October 2021 14:09:23 Greg Wooledge wrote:

> On Sun, Oct 17, 2021 at 06:35:01PM +0200, deloptes wrote:
> > > 2. and another pesky thing is starting a konsole to do work, needs
> > > a $PATH modification that we used to put in ~.profile. But opening
> > > a terminal hasn't called a ". .profile" since about jessie.  So
> > > thats another PITA.
> > >
> > > So, what has replaced .profile as the function for such as that in
> > > recent releases?
> >
> > AFAIK bash is not reading profile when you login, but not sure - it
> > could be also that it is not a login shell.
> > AFAIK you should open the terminal with "bash --login" to read the
> > profile. So try in the terminal "bash --login"
> >
> > I have put in my .profile
> >
> > alias bash='bash --login'
> >
> > long time ago
>
> OK, first thing first: that alias won't do *anything* useful.  If Gene
> is talking about starting a terminal from his window manager or
> desktop environment, that terminal is going to run $SHELL which is
> /bin/bash. It will not look at his aliases, no matter where they're
> defined.  It's just going to run bash.  Not "bash --login".
>
> Now let's step back a bit.
>
> When you run an instance of a shell, there are two ways you can do it.
> You either run a "login shell", or a "non-login shell".
>
> The purpose of a login shell is to be executed when you login.  That's
> the original intent.  Back in the 70s and 80s, there was no such thing
> as a "desktop".  There was just the shell.  You logged in by
> connecting your terminal or your modem to the host system, and getting
> a textual prompt.  After authentication, you were "logged in", and the
> system would run your account's shell with a "-" character in front of
> it.  This is the ancient way that your system said "this should be a
> login shell, not a regular shell".
>
> It looks like this:
>
> unicorn:~$ ps -ft tty1
> UID          PID    PPID  C STIME TTY          TIME CMD
> root         699       1  0 Oct09 tty1     00:00:00 /bin/login -p --
> greg         851     699  0 Oct09 tty1     00:00:00 -bash
> greg         863     851  0 Oct09 tty1     00:00:00 /bin/sh
> /usr/bin/startx [...]
>
> See where it says "-bash"?  That's my login shell.
>
> The purpose of having a "login shell" and a "regular shell" is because
> you probably have some things that you need to do once per session,
> when you login.  Like, setting up your environment variables.  Or
> printing today's calendar, or today's message from the administration.
> All of those things are unnecessary in a regular shell.  The
> environment is already set up, and you've already seen today's
> calendar or whatever.
>
> Any other time you started a shell, it would not have a "-" in front
> of its name, so it would be a regular shell.  This included shell
> escapes from your text editor or mail reader or news reader or pager. 
> Any time you escaped to a new shell from inside your editor, you
> didn't need to go through all the gyrations that a login shell did. 
> You don't want to see the calendar again, etc.
>
> A decade or two later, some people developed a windowing system.
>
> In this windowing system, there's a terminal emulator.  Normally when
> you run a terminal emulator, you run a shell inside it.  (Not always,
> but usually.)  This shell doesn't need to be a login shell.  You're
> probably going to open half a dozen terminal emulators with shells in
> them, maybe more.  You don't need to run the day's calendar, or set up
> the session environment, in every single terminal.  All of that has
> been taken care of already.  (Right?)
>
> So, in an X terminal emulator, you normally run a NON-login shell. 
> Just a regular shell.
>
> That's how it's supposed to work.
>
> However.
>
> Some people found that they had a really hard time getting their
> initial environment set up during their X logins.  This was common
> among newbies especially, because they didn't understand the new login
> procedure, and had no idea how to customize it.
>
> And where did we have a shit-load of Unix newbies?  Universities.
>
> So, in the world of academia, there is a whole different paradigm.  In
> this world, where everyone is expected to be incompetent, the old way
> of setting up your environment one time and inheriting it in every
> shell... that doesn't work.
>
> In the newbie-centric environment, where nobody knows how to do
> anything correctly, terminal emulators are configured to run login
> shells.
>
> There's an option for it, of course.  The people who wrote xterm
> realized that one might wish to run either a regular shell or a login
> shell.  So xterm has this option:
>
>        -ls     This option indicates that the shell that is started in
> the xterm window will be a login shell (i.e., the first character of
> argv[0] will be a dash, indicating to the shell that it should read
> the user's .login or .profile).
>
> Universities configured things so that their users' terminals would
> all run with this option, which means the users would get a login
> shell in each terminal.
>
> And then the users, who were all newbies and don't know any better,
> could simply be told "if you want to change your environment, edit
> this one dot file".  (In academia, csh was the dominant shell, so the
> file in question would usually be .login as the xterm man page hints
> at.  In most Linux distributions, the shell is bash, so the file is
> .profile or .bash_profile.  But in any case, there's just *one* file
> for the user to worry about, and support calls are reduced.)
>
> In modern times, the place where we find nothing but newbies as far as
> the eye can see... is called Ubuntu.  If you get a question from an
> Ubuntu user, they're probably completely inexperienced, and know
> virtually nothing.  Therefore, in an Ubuntu setup, it would make sense
> to strip everything down so there's only one way to do things.  That
> makes it easier to answer questions.  You don't have to *educate* the
> user.  You don't have to help them understand anything.  You don't
> have to explain why things work they way they do.  You just tell them
> "edit this file".
>
> In Gene's old environment, someone had clearly gone Academia/Ubuntu on
> him, and had configured his terminals to run login shells.
>
> This isn't *wrong*.  It's a way to do things.  But what it means is
> Gene was operating in Ubuntu-user mode for all that time.  He never
> learned the original way to do things, or why he was using the
> simplified way, or even that there *was* a choice of ways.
>
> So, that's the history and background.
>
> Now we're back to the present.  The question, I believe, is:
>
>
>    **** How do I set up my environment? ****
>
>
> This is not a trivial question to answer, because there are so many
> different possible setups.  It all depends on how you login.
>
> 1) If you ssh into the system, then you get a login shell.  This login
>    shell *is* your session.  So, all you have to do is set up your
> login shell environment.
>
>    If your shell is bash, then you edit the file .bash_profile if that
>    exists, or .bash_login if that exists, or .profile if neither of
>    the other two files exists.
>
>    On a regular Debian system, there is no .bash_profile or
> .bash_login file, so you'd simply edit .profile.  That's the only file
> you have to worry about for your login enviroment.
>
> 2) If you login on the Linux console (/dev/tty1 and so on), in text
> mode, then you *also* get a login shell.  So everything is the same as
> the ssh case.  See above.
>
>    Even if you start an X session (by typing "startx"), your
> environment has already been set up by your login shell.  You don't
> need to set it up again inside the X session.  The X session inherits
> the environment from the login shell, and then the terminal emulators
> inherit it from the X session, and the shells that run inside the
> terminal emulators inherit it from the terminals.
>
> 3) If you login to X11 with a graphical display manager, everything
>    is completely different.  You do *not* get a login shell as your
>    session.  You don't get a login shell at all.  Ever.  (Unless
> someone went and Ubuntu-fied your terminals.)
>
>    In this case, you can have one of a few different types of session.
>    Because why would anything ever be simple?
>
>    If you use a standard Debian X11 session, you can configured it in
> one of two different ways:
>
>    a) If you have a .xsession file, this overrides the system's X11
>       session.  You control exactly what gets executed.  You can
>       configure your environment in the .xsession file, or you can
> have it dot in a shell configuration file.  You just have to know what
> you're doing.
>
>    b) If you use the standard system session, Debian lets you
> customize it in the .xsessionrc file.  This gets dotted in by the
> session before it starts running X apps.  So you can configure your
> environment in this file.
>
>       .xsessionrc is unique to Debian.  It's not found on other Linux
>       variants.  Some other Linuxes introduce .xprofile or other
> files.
>
>    And then there's GNOME.  Because obviously GNOME has to be unique
> and have its own separate session type, and its own way of doing
> everything, none of the answers above applies to GNOME.  Except maybe
> the .xsessionrc file.  I think Debian still arranges for GNOME
> sessions to dot that in.  Maybe.  Don't quote me on it.
>
>    (But don't think that your job is done if you manage to export
>    environment variables from .xsessionrc.  Oh no.  GNOME is *so* much
>    worse than that.  It's so bad that I won't even try to describe
>    it here.  It needs a whole thread of its own.  We've had several
>    over the years.)
>
> 4) And finally there's Wayland.  I don't know what the hell Wayland
> does. Nobody who uses it has ever told us how it works.  You won't
> find any useful information about it on the Debian wiki, etc.
>
> See also:
>
> https://wiki.debian.org/Xsession
> https://wiki.debian.org/EnvironmentVariables

Is it beer-thirty yet?  Tis here. Except its a stretch to call the stuff 
this diabetic drinks beer. ;o)  Some won't even call my coffee coffee.

Cheers, Gene Heskett.
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author, 1940)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
 - Louis D. Brandeis
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>

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Thread

A .profile puzzle Gene Heskett <gheskett@shentel.net> - 2021-10-17 18:20 +0200
  Re: A .profile puzzle deloptes <emanoil.kotsev@deloptes.org> - 2021-10-17 18:40 +0200
    Re: A .profile puzzle Gene Heskett <gheskett@shentel.net> - 2021-10-17 19:30 +0200
      Re: A .profile puzzle "Andrew M.A. Cater" <amacater@einval.com> - 2021-10-17 19:40 +0200
        Re: A .profile puzzle David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk> - 2021-10-22 17:00 +0200
    Re: A .profile puzzle Greg Wooledge <greg@wooledge.org> - 2021-10-17 20:10 +0200
      Re: A .profile puzzle Gene Heskett <gheskett@shentel.net> - 2021-10-17 20:30 +0200
  Re: A .profile puzzle Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org> - 2021-10-17 19:00 +0200
    Re: A .profile puzzle Gene Heskett <gheskett@shentel.net> - 2021-10-17 20:20 +0200
      Re: A .profile puzzle songbird <songbird@anthive.com> - 2021-10-17 21:50 +0200
        Re: A .profile puzzle Gene Heskett <gheskett@shentel.net> - 2021-10-17 23:00 +0200
        Re: A .profile puzzle Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> - 2021-10-17 23:20 +0200
          Re: A .profile puzzle David Christensen <dpchrist@holgerdanske.com> - 2021-10-18 02:40 +0200
            Re: A .profile puzzle Douglas McGarrett <dmcgarrett@optonline.net> - 2021-10-18 03:20 +0200
              Re: A .profile puzzle Gene Heskett <gheskett@shentel.net> - 2021-10-18 06:00 +0200
          Re: A .profile puzzle songbird <songbird@anthive.com> - 2021-10-18 05:20 +0200
  Re: A .profile puzzle Will Mengarini <seldon@eskimo.com> - 2021-10-18 07:30 +0200
    Re: A .profile puzzle Gene Heskett <gheskett@shentel.net> - 2021-10-18 07:50 +0200
      Re: A .profile puzzle Greg Wooledge <greg@wooledge.org> - 2021-10-18 13:20 +0200
        Re: A .profile puzzle Gene Heskett <gheskett@shentel.net> - 2021-10-18 15:00 +0200
          Re: A .profile puzzle Greg Wooledge <greg@wooledge.org> - 2021-10-18 15:50 +0200
            Re: A .profile puzzle David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk> - 2021-10-18 18:20 +0200
  Re: A .profile puzzle piorunz <piorunz@gmx.com> - 2021-10-24 04:10 +0200
    Re: A .profile puzzle Gene Heskett <gheskett@shentel.net> - 2021-10-24 05:30 +0200

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