Forcing actions at login

[Dik T. Winter]

In article <1991Jan23.191016.20988 at mp.cs.niu.edu> rickert at mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:
 >  Whether all this is really worth the trouble is quite questionable.
 > 
Depends.  When you need it for accounting the trouble is worthwile.  For all
other situations you should not force users to go through some predefined
actions.  I have seen many solutions, one of them provided a system wide
profile that asked for terminal type.  That is gross, unless it is possible
to overrule it.  Consider a section of my 500+ lines profile (where TERM
has just been read, or has been gotten through the network):
		if grep "$TERM" $HOME/lib/termcap >/dev/null 2>&1
		then
			TERMCAP=$HOME/lib/termcap
		fi
		if test -f $HOME/lib/terminfo/*/$TERM
		then
			TERMINFO=$HOME/lib/terminfo
		fi
		export TERMCAP TERMINFO
		eval `tset - -Q -s`
Yes, I like my own personalized terminal descriptions, but sometimes I want
the standard ones, but that depends on the way I got onto the machine (telnet,
direct, rlogin etc.).

Also, on some machines I have access to, /etc/profile is executed twice when I
login.  Once when my login shell is started (/bin/sh on those machines).  The
shell soon executes the command 'exec -myshell' which starts my own shell.
This one dutifully reexecutes /etc/profile.  So I get twice /etc/motd while
zero times is enough in my opinion.

Further, why does /etc/profile check for mail in SysV UNIX?  I read my mail
on one machine only, but the mailbox is NFS mounted on all machines.  I do
not want to see that message any time I login to some random machine.
Luckily our system administrator could be convinced to do it conditional on
.hushlogin (it did not need much convincing).

Summary: you should only force something on the user if it is related to
accounting; nothing else.  You should never force a particular PATH; you
may give him some functions/aliases that can make life simple.  But he
should be able to redefine/undefine them.
--
dik t. winter, cwi, amsterdam, nederland
dik at cwi.nl