Re: PATH changing in RH7.1

[Gordon Messmer <yinyang eburg com>]

On Sat, 1 Sep 2001, John P. Verel wrote:

> My /etc/rc.d/re.local looks, in part, like this:
...
> I run ximian Gnome, Red Hat 7.1.  It is possible that path gets
> clobbered by gnome?

I see that you've already solved this, but in the interest of clarity and
grokking I thought I'd throw in my 2cents.

Variables set in a shell (or any other process) only propagate to children
of that shell, and then, only if they're exported.  Your system's rc files
are not the parents of any of your login processes.  'init' is the first
process that runs on your system, and runs whatever startup scripts are
appropriate.  Whatever those scripts do has no effect on the environment
of the init process.  When they exit, their environments are gone.  init
then continues to start the login terminals, gdm, whatever else...  These
are responsible for setting up their own environment, because init hasn't
really done any of that for them.

It's not that your settings were "clobbered" by GNOME, but they were
installed in a place that they couldn't propagate to the rest of the
system.

-- 
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	I'd have one dollar. - Squidward to SpongeBob