Steve Doerr wrote: > I'm confused about root's bash profile. Let me give it a shot at unconfusing you.
> In vt1,
What *exactly* do you mean by vt1? To me it means that you are using
the first virtual terminal. What you get when you don't have a
graphical login manager such as xdm, kdm, gdm. Or that you switched
to it using ALT-F1 or CNTL-ALT-F1 from the graphical login.
But it says absolutly nothing about whether you logged in as yourself
or as root or as yourself and then did su or sudo to get to a root
prompt. And those are critical pieces of information.
> the directories /sbin & /usr/local/sbin are excluded from
> the path.
Sounds like you logged in at the text character console using
yourself. That all sounds very normal. If using bash/zsh/sh/ksh,
etc. then /etc/profile is sourced followed by any personal environment
files. (If csh/tcsh then /etc/csh.login is sourced followed by any
personal environment files.) For bash personal environment files are
the first one of .bash_profile, .profile, found. In that file if you
want .bashrc sourced at login time then you need to say that there
explicitly as it is not automatic to give you flexibility and
control. Normally you want the .bashrc sourced and would always say
so there.
In this configuration if you want /usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/sbin in
your path you need to say so expliclitly too. This is not the default
since only system administrators need those commands and it tends to
confuse the rest.
PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/sbin:/sbin
> If I su to root within Gnome or KDE in a terminal they
> are there.
The 'su' program knows you are becoming root and adds those paths for
you automatically because normally with a simple su there won't be any
environment loaded.
In 'man su' it says:
The current environment is passed to the new shell. The
value of $PATH is reset to /bin:/usr/bin for normal users,
or /sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin for the super user. This
may be changed with the ENV_PATH and ENV_SUPATH defini
tions in /etc/login.defs. When using the -m or -p options,
the users environment is not changed.
> I'm not sure why there isn't a common bash profile for root in vt1 vs.
> vt7. Where would the two be located? Within vt1, will
> PATH=/dir1:/dir2:/diretc/:$PATH add it permanently?
Hopefully I was able to clear up this confusion. There is no
difference between vt1 and vt7. But there is a difference between
logging into the system on vt1 using 'getty' and 'login' and logging
into vt7 using 'kdm' (or xdm or gdm). In the latter case your
.bash_profile is not run. In the latter case of the graphical login
your .xsession file has the same place as your .bash_profile does for
character login sessions. If you are using bash you can use the
following to make your graphical login read your environment profile.
Don't forget to 'chmod a+x ~/.xsession' to make it executable.
#!/bin/bash --login
exec x-session-manager # or fvwm or olvwm or ...
Beware that mistakes in your .xsession or .bash_profile will prevent
you from logging into the system. Beware that your personal scripts
are not run when using the [xgk]dm if KDE or Gnome is explicitly
selected which really means only run the KDE or Gnome scripts.
I recommend that you install and use 'sudo'. It allows you to do root
privilege commands without being root all of the time. Very
convenient. (E.g. 'sudo addgroup you audio') You will need to
configure /etc/sudoers with 'visudo' to allow yourself root access
first.
Bob
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