Shell/Cshell questions

[Scott Wilson]

>When Csh starts up, it sources the commands in both .cshrc and .login.
>Normally .login contains setup information you wish to be active during
>the entire life of your login session, such as TERM, PATH, ...  The
>.cshrc file is examined for each subsequent invocation of csh, so you
>put stuff there which needs to be modified or reset when a subshell
>starts up.  Someone else should be able to add more to this...

In the old days when everyone just logged into a terminal it was easier
to decide whether settings of various things should go in .login or
.cshrc.  However, in the days of networked window systems things can get
a little messier.  At the last place I worked it was quite common to
use rsh to start an xterm running csh on a remote machine with output
directed to the local machine's X server.  This gives you the strange
situation of having a csh that is not the child of a login shell.
Therefore you had to set things like environment variables that
would otherwise be inherited from a login shell in .cshrc.

--
Scott Wilson		arpa: swilson at sun.com
Sun Microsystems	uucp: ...!sun!swilson
Mt. View, CA