Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 86361
xdm does not start proper login shell
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:52:13 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; Q312461) Description of problem: login via xdm apparently does not create a proper login shell process. In particular, if the user's default shell is bash, the .bash_profile and .bash_logout scripts are not run at the proper times. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): XFree86-xdm-4.2.0-8 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Set up Linux machine with xdm (x windows) 2.Create user with bash as login shell 3.Create .bash_profile and .bash_logout scripts for this user whose execution can be verified. 4.Log in and check if .bash_profile has been run 5.Log out from xdm session and check for .bash_logout having been run Actual Results: Commands in the .bash_profile, and .bash_logout were never run. Expected Results: Commands in .bash_profile should be run as soon as user logs in BEFORE his xdm session is visible. Commands in .bash_logout should be run when xdm seesion is terminated. Additional info: The first process run with the logged in user's id appears to be /bin/sh which runs the script to run KDE (or GNOME ...). This process needs to be changed to be a LOGIN shell for the user.
When logged into xdm/gdm/kdm or while in an X session started from the commandline via "startx", by default most (possibly all) X terminal emulators start up using non-login subshells. The "bash" shell only processes the .bash_profile file on interactive login shells, so by default, starting any terminal emulator without specifying a login shell will give a non-login subshell. This is expected behaviour. If you have any commands present in .bash_profile which you would like to have invoked automatically by all shells, it is best to place this code in the .bashrc file instead, as that is sourced by all shells. The full rules for which startup files are sourced by bash under various conditions are documented in detail on the bash manpage under the "INVOCATION" section. If you prefer nonetheless to have your terminals invoke login shells always, refer to the terminal emulator's commandline usage screen, manpages or other documentation for how to invoke the shell as a login shell. For xterm, this can be done by invoking it as "xterm -ls". Other terminals have similar commandline switches that may work the same. Setting status to "NOTABUG".