On Wed, Jan 09, 2002 at 11:01:39AM +0800, Patrick Hsieh wrote: > I have set some aliases in /etc/profile, but > when I enter "screen" and create a new "screen" session, > it does not work, I am afraid screen will not read /etc/profile. > Idea?
Screen doesn't read profile or .bashrc, bash does. Screen causes a shell (bash) to be run, and then bash is failing to read your /etc/profile. This is because you have already logged in, and you are running a bash that only reads bashrc (not a "login" bash). According to the man page (bash(1)), if you run a login bash, it will execute /etc/profile, if it exists, then it will run a user-specific version of it (such as $HOME/.bash_profile, $HOME/.bash_login or $HOME/.profile) if that exists. When you run an interactive non-login bash, it will run $HOME/.bashrc if one exists. It's actually more complicated than that, but this describes the defaults. You could set your aliases from .bashrc. If you want them to be system-wide, you can make a file /etc/bash.bashrc (if it's not already there) and source that file from your $HOME/.bashrc. You'll have to have a $HOME/.bashrc that sources /etc/bash.bashrc for every user. That's actually pretty easy to do: before you create the new users, put a line in /etc/skel/.bashrc to source the /etc/bash.bashrc, and when you create new users they will have a copy of all the files in /etc/skel. Generally, /etc/profile is for things that can be inherited from one shell to a subshell (such as environment variables), and bashrc is for things that must be run in each shell (whether login ones or not). It is common to call $HOME/.bashrc from the $HOME/.login file, so that the first shell (the login shell) will have all the stuff set that the subshells have (from .bashrc). This is a simplification also: there are some commands you don't want to run if you are running a non-interactive shell. See the man page, and the examples in /usr/share/doc/bash/examples/startup-files. Hmm, that's strange, I found the above reference in /etc/skel/.bashrc, but did not find an examples directory in /usr/share/doc/bash. Odd... Oh well, the scripts in /etc/skel are good examples. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Welcome to the GNU age! http://www.gnu.org
