[vox-tech] bash environment variables (and KDE)

[Mark K. Kim]

~/.bashrc OR ~/.bash_profile.  One gets run when you open a terminal, the
other when there is no terminal.  I gave up trying to figure it out 'cuz
it's so twisted and inconsistent from distribution to distribution, no
matter what the man page says or how it's supposed to be.

The latest technique seems to be to get ~/.bash_profile to run ~/.bashrc,
and check the PS1 (the prompt) variable to see if we're inside a terminal
or not.  If it is, then display some fortune messages and set some
interesting variables for controlling the terminal behavior and what not.
Otherwise we're probably running inside a script so don't do anything we'd
want done only inside a terminal.

-Mark


On Fri, 30 Apr 2004, Jonathan Stickel wrote:

> There are still a couple things in linux that seem to be unnecessarily
> convoluted and really bug me.  One is sound, which I've finally managed
> to work around using alsa and dmix.
>
> The other is handling user-specified shell environment variables.  I use
> bash, and by trial and error I've found I can put what I want in
> .bashrc.  IIRC, I remember reading that this really isn't the place for
> custom variables, but this is what has worked for me.  Recently, I've
> defined $TEXINPUTS, a path variable for tex/latex.  When I run latex
> from shell, it uses the path I've defined by $TEXINPUTS correctly.
> However, if I start Emacs from KDE's kmenu, $TEXINPUTS is NOT read, and
> thus running latex from within Emacs doesn't work like I expect.  It
> turns out that KDE, when started through xdm/kdm, does not read .bashrc
> at all
> (http://lists.debian.org/debian-kde/2002/debian-kde-200209/msg00083.html).
>   However, .bashrc does get read when starting a shell from within KDE.
>
> So my question is:  what really is the correct place to put
> user-specific bash variables?  And, how do I make KDE read them when
> logging in from kdm?
>
> Thanks,
> Jonathan
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