[aklug] Re: What happened to /etc/profile?

On Thu, 22 Jan 2009, Damien Hull wrote:

> There's a section on the LPI test about the bash shell. It covers config files, login, logout, variables etc... I checked my own /etc/profile to find something very strange. There's no PATH variable.
>
> It turns out this is a wacky Debian thing. I'm on Ubuntu and it inherits wacky things from Debian. The PATH variable is in /etc/login.defs. Why does Debian do wacky things like this?
>
> Unless other distributions are doing the same thing. All my systems are running Ubuntu.

That's not wacky, that's legacy -- login *is* responsible for setting a
minimal environment into place. That said, many distributions also set
customizations in bash login scripts, and even PAM allows you to control
environment variables. That typically works off of /etc/environment and/or
/etc/security/pam_env.conf.

All told, login.defs is largely deprecated by PAM, but it's still an
important file to maintain.

         --Arthur Corliss
           Live Free or Die
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Received on Thu Jan 22 08:45:15 2009