Re: environment settings

[Stephane Chazelas <Stephane_Chazelas@xxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 08:49:03AM +0000, Jörg Sommer wrote:
> Stephane Chazelas <Stephane_Chazelas@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 08:33:02AM +0000, Jörg Sommer wrote:
> > [...]
> >> > Which in a way makes sense though is not very useful. ~/.zshrc
> >> > is your shell configuration file. ~/.zprofile is you session
> >> > configuration file.
> >> >
> >> > Generally, in ~/.zshrc, you put stuff that affects the behavior
> >> > of interactive shells (sets shell options, defines shell
> >> > aliases, configure completions).
> >> >
> >> > In ~/.zprofile, you define what affects any process started in
> >> > your session not necessarily only the shell processes.
> >> 
> >> And what's the meaning of .zshenv? I use it for my environment variables
> >> like EDITOR, because my session is started by X.
> > [...]
> >
> > Your X login procedure should source your .zprofile
> 
> How should this work? How can a binary program or a Perl script source a
> shell file?
[...]

I've seen different approaches implemented. Most often, the
session startup command run's the user's shell as in
(simplified)

if user_shell =~ csh
  exec usershell -c 'source ~/.login; exec xinit'
elseif usershell =~ zsh
  exec usershell -c 'source ~/.zprofile; exec xinit'
else
  exec usershell -c '. ~/.profile; exec xinit'

-- 
Stéphane