.profile for pterm shells?

GENERAL Cafe
1

When logging in, the ksh shell reads and executes the commands in .profile.

In Photon when you bring up a pterm, you get a shell, but it does not execute .profile.

Does anyone know how to remedy this situation?

2

put this line in .profile

export ENV=$HOME/.kshrc

create a $HOME/.kshrc file, put whatever command you want to run
in there.

3

Thank you for the reply. Unfortunately this does not work. As I mentioned in the original post, .profile is not read in when pterm creates sh, only when login creates it. Any other ideas?

4

It should just work fine.
As you pointed out, .profile is only read when you login. This means after you modified your .profile as xtang suggested, you need to logout/login again so that the .profile change can take effect. With the .profile change, your pterm (or any shell session) will read/source $HOME/.kshrc file.

5

If make the changes described, and then reboot and login using the Photon login screen .profile is not read in.
Are you suggesting that I bring down photon and login, then start Photon again?
Or could you mean, that on each pterm, I have to logout and login?

6

Maschoen,

I believe you need to bring down photon (or rather go back to the login screen on photon) and then re-login to photon.

pterm AFAIK always creates a new terminal as the user that initially logged into to photon. It doesn’t appear to run an actual ‘log in’ like a text console does (otherwise you’d have to enter your username and password each time).

If you want a .profile to be executed each time a user creates a new pterm your going to have to add the ‘-l’ option to pterm. You can do this by right clicking on the ‘terminal’ button, click setup and then after the pterm add the -l.

Tim

7

Tim,

Thanks, I'll try bringing down photon and re-logging in.   It seems to defeat the whole purpose of booting into Photon but at least I would only have to do it once per-boot.   As far as the -l option, I'd have to login to each pterm I brought up, which again defeats the purpose.
8

Well this works, so thanks to all.
This will save me thousands of keystrokes over the next year.
I might note, when I put an alias in .profile, it is not available in the pterms,
however when I put it in a .kshrc file, as xtang suggested, it does.

9

Maschoen,

If you add the ‘-l’ option to pterm you don’t actually log in using your username and password each time you create a new pterm. Photon automatically passes that info to the pterm. All it does is makes sure you run your .profile file each time a pterm is created.

If the .kshrc file accomplishes the same thing then you can forgo the -l option.

Tim

10

Thanks again Tim, I’ll try it. I checked the parameters of pterm before I posted, and I have to say that the description of -l is a little confusing to me, “Start shell as a login shell”. Does sound like it will put up a login prompt.