Friday, April 04, 2008
Global $PATH with Debian
Well, one of the constant sources of trouble for nowadays UNIX users is continuous contradiction between UNIX command-line-based roots and modern "Windows-like" desktop environments.
Let's say I want to add new directory to "global" system $PATH. That is, I want all applications, no matter how started, from the command line or from GUI, no matter by what user, is to be able to find executables in certain directory, among others like "/usr" or "/usr/local/bin".
Interestingly, there is no simple or at least standard way of accomplishing this simple task.
On a very basic level, there are two main "sources" of the environment
1. Shell initialization file, system-wide or per-user. For "bash", these are:
/etc/bash.bashrc
/etc/profile
~/.bashrc
~/.profile
~/.bash_profile
It is important that all files from this list which have "profile" in their names are only invoked by "login" shells; that is, only for shells which are invoked when user logins remotely to the system or for shells started with "--login" (or just "-l") command line options.
2. Various "display managers", like GDM = "Gnome Display Manager".
Now, here is a tricky part: I could not figure it out how GDM sets it environments. Environment itself which comes out from GDM is actually identical to that set up in file /etc/login.defs, but changing said file appears to have no effect.
However, there is another file which GDM appears to honor: /etc/environment (note that this is NOT a bash script, but a simple configuration file). And yes, you can add PATH definition there and GDM will use it with no interference.
The only problem is that GNOME (and all other modern desktops) have a feature "run as root", and that requires different environment (again, I believe default one is identical to one defined in /etc/login.defs).
Given this situation, there are two basic strategies to define your system $PATH. You can of course customize both to fit your needs.
Approach 1 is described here.
The basic idea is that if there is a local user-defined executable file ~/.xsession, GDM will invoke it when firing up default user session. Therefore, this ~/.xsession file
#! /bin/bash --login
exec x-session-manager
makes sure windows environment is consistent with login environment.
Of course, you can change header to simply "#! /bin/sh" and set any environment you want in the same file before invoking x-session-manager.
Approach 2
Set your global $PATH in /etc/environment, but then make sure it is good both for regular login and applications requiring super-user privileges. Here is mine:
PATH=/usr/local/bin:/opt/jdk/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/bin/X11:/usr/games:/sbin:/usr/sbin
You can and probably should customize your bash configuration files to set local $PATH for user (by default, file ~/.bash_profile prepends "~/bin" to $PATH)
Let's say I want to add new directory to "global" system $PATH. That is, I want all applications, no matter how started, from the command line or from GUI, no matter by what user, is to be able to find executables in certain directory, among others like "/usr" or "/usr/local/bin".
Interestingly, there is no simple or at least standard way of accomplishing this simple task.
On a very basic level, there are two main "sources" of the environment
1. Shell initialization file, system-wide or per-user. For "bash", these are:
/etc/bash.bashrc
/etc/profile
~/.bashrc
~/.profile
~/.bash_profile
It is important that all files from this list which have "profile" in their names are only invoked by "login" shells; that is, only for shells which are invoked when user logins remotely to the system or for shells started with "--login" (or just "-l") command line options.
2. Various "display managers", like GDM = "Gnome Display Manager".
Now, here is a tricky part: I could not figure it out how GDM sets it environments. Environment itself which comes out from GDM is actually identical to that set up in file /etc/login.defs, but changing said file appears to have no effect.
However, there is another file which GDM appears to honor: /etc/environment (note that this is NOT a bash script, but a simple configuration file). And yes, you can add PATH definition there and GDM will use it with no interference.
The only problem is that GNOME (and all other modern desktops) have a feature "run as root", and that requires different environment (again, I believe default one is identical to one defined in /etc/login.defs).
Given this situation, there are two basic strategies to define your system $PATH. You can of course customize both to fit your needs.
Approach 1 is described here.
The basic idea is that if there is a local user-defined executable file ~/.xsession, GDM will invoke it when firing up default user session. Therefore, this ~/.xsession file
#! /bin/bash --login
exec x-session-manager
makes sure windows environment is consistent with login environment.
Of course, you can change header to simply "#! /bin/sh" and set any environment you want in the same file before invoking x-session-manager.
Approach 2
Set your global $PATH in /etc/environment, but then make sure it is good both for regular login and applications requiring super-user privileges. Here is mine:
PATH=/usr/local/bin:/opt/jdk/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/bin/X11:/usr/games:/sbin:/usr/sbin
You can and probably should customize your bash configuration files to set local $PATH for user (by default, file ~/.bash_profile prepends "~/bin" to $PATH)
# posted by Kostya @ 5:17 PM 
