I'm not sure if this is a bug or just an annoyance, but at any rate... rxvt sets the DISPLAY environment variable to unix:0.0 rather than just the local :0.0 It does this when no -display option is given to it. I was using rxvt-2.6.1-1 from RedHat 6.1, and the same problem seems to be present in rxvt-2.6.1-2 from Raw Hide. Again, this may be some sort of intended behavior that just seems odd to me, but I thought you should probably be informed. Thanks in advance, Matt
unix:0.0 is a synonym for :0.0. Trust us.
It *is* a bug, in particular the behaviour is inconsistent with the man page. Note that if DISPLAY is set to :0.1 when rxvt is invoked, the rxvt window still appears on Screen 0; to get reasonable behaviour, you need to use rxvt -d $DISPLAY
The annoyance I found, although I was incorrect to blame rxvt, *is* still in existance. I suppose I could/should start a new bug, but if someone at redhat is watching this... Some (GTK) applications have trouble with the unix:0.0 DISPLAY variable. I get "can't resolve hostname unix!" from a lot of GTK apps. The workaround was to undefine the compile-time option from rxvt (or just use -d, or ...) and I assumed it was just an rxvt problem. Next time I have an opportunity to reproduce this I'll send specifics.