I'm a Linux newbie and I've been systematically reading the O'Reilly book "Learning the bash Shell" by C. Newham, et. al. (this is not a plug). I run RH 6.2, with the old (2.2) kernel, but I have manually upgraded the shell to bash version 2.04. I'm up to chapter three, which deals with customizing the shell's behavior, including the use of environment settings and options in the (global) bashrc and profile files, and I'm having some trouble understanding how to implement certain settings of the shell. I was able to set the FCEDIT variable within profile, but all my attempts to set the HISTIGNORE variable in that same file have failed. I have also been unable to make "set -o ignoreeof" "stick" when located in profile.... yet both the HISTIGNORE and ignoreeof settings are perfectly happy in bashrc, which, from my inspection of the comments in profile and bashrc, seems like the "wrong place" for them to be. Am I making sense? Anyhow, with the current setup, I get the results I want, but it seems messy and a bit arbitrary, which probably means I've missed some subtlety of proper configuration practices. BTW, although I like Newham's book, there are some gaps in the explanation of setting environment variables that are deppening my current confusion. I've included the two current versions of the files /etc/bashrc and /etc/profile as inline text below... my additions to the original articles are marked with #### and are as follows: in bashrc: added lines 6-16; lines 12-16 appear (to me) to be in the "wrong file", since they deal with the environment and are not aliases or function definitions... but this is what works for now! in profile: added lines 22-24; tried inserting lines 12-16 from bashrc at line 25 but to no avail. Thanks in advance to anyone who can help out! jkatz ::::: profile ::::: # /etc/profile # System wide environment and startup programs # Functions and aliases go in /etc/bashrc PATH="$PATH:/usr/X11R6/bin" ulimit -c 1000000 if [ `id -gn` = `id -un` -a `id -u` -gt 14 ]; then umask 002 else umask 022 fi USER=`id -un` LOGNAME=$USER MAIL="/var/spool/mail/$USER" HOSTNAME=`/bin/hostname` HISTSIZE=1000 # System environment settings added by jkatz 11-Feb-2001 FCEDIT="/usr/bin/emacs" #### if [ -z "$INPUTRC" -a ! -f "$HOME/.inputrc" ]; then INPUTRC=/etc/inputrc fi export PATH USER LOGNAME MAIL HOSTNAME HISTSIZE INPUTRC for i in /etc/profile.d/*.sh ; do if [ -x $i ]; then . $i fi done unset i ::::: bashrc ::::: # /etc/bashrc # System wide functions and aliases # Environment stuff goes in /etc/profile # System aliases added by jkatz 11-Feb-2001 alias la='ls -la' #### alias md='mkdir' #### alias rd='rmdir' #### alias ro='rm *~; rm .*~' #### # System options added by jkatz 11-Feb-2001 set -o ignoreeof #### HISTIGNORE="&" #### # are we an interactive shell? if [ "$PS1" ]; then if [ "x`tput kbs`" != "x" ]; then # We can't do this with "dumb" terminal stty erase `tput kbs` fi case $TERM in xterm*) PROMPT_COMMAND='echo -ne "\033]0;${USER}@${HOSTNAME}: ${PWD}\007"' ;; *) ;; esac PS1="[\u@\h \W]\\$ " if [ "x$SHLVL" != "x1" ]; then # We're not a login shell for i in /etc/profile.d/*.sh; do if [ -x $i ]; then . $i fi done fi fi _______________________________________________ techtalk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.linux.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/techtalk