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Re: tcsh and chere-0.3-1


On Wed, Oct 13, 2004 at 07:02:13PM -0400, Christopher Faylor wrote:
>Actually, All shells which support -l seem to cd to the home directory.
>I'm not sure what the -l adds to the above since the above code just
>calls the shell again after cd'ing to the directory.

I think the purpose of that is to ensure that ~/.login (or whatever) gets
called to completely set up the shell's environment.  Normal shells don't
read in that file because they are assumed to inherit their environment
from the base login shell.

>It almost seems like you could just use ash to invoke the real shell in
>all cases.  That would be faster.

True, you could use any shell as the base login shell which exec's the
desired shell.  That has the benefit of always working.  However, that
approach will bypass the login-shell-specific config files for other shell
types.  For instance, "ash -" will load env vars from ~/.profile rather
than ~/.login which a tcsh user is unlikely to have set up to produce
identical results (for instance I like to put MANPATH in ~/.login but I
don't have a ~/.profile at all).  This would result in a "chere" shell
which will not behave quite like the user's regular shells, which are
spawned from a login shell of the same flavor.

Actually that appears to be another bug in the script:  chere should
invoke ash as "ash -" to start an ash login shell (I haven't tested this
though).

I think with most login shells the "cd $HOME" behavior is due to the way
the scripts are written in /etc (for example Cygwin's /etc/csh.login).
That is probably a good thing to have in the script, but it presents a
difficulty for this unusual application.

-Andy


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