Automatic login script execution

[Dan Rich]

In article <4147 at uceng.UC.EDU> schriste at uceng.UC.EDU (Steven V. Christensen) writes:
> Can anyone point me to a login.c replacement which causes a global
> .login file to be executed first? I assume I would place a "source ~/.login"
> as the last line of this global file.

Everyone seems to be asking "Why?" to this question, but there is a
host of reasons to do this.  Actually, most of the reasons I have run
into are more appropriate for a "group" login, but a system login can
do many of the same things.

At the University I attended, they would put a:
source GROUP/.login
in our .login files, where GROUP was replaced with our group library.
This was do to give us access to local (class) libraries, and to give
us access to software that was not accessable to other classes.

Here at Dialogic we use the System V /etc/profile to define our global
paths, display the system news, and define global aliases.  Without
the /etc/profile, we would have to add all of this to each individual
.profile.  Not only is this a waste of disk space, but in my
experience, users have a tendency to remove anything that they don't
immediately recognize from their .profiles.


--
Dan Rich                    | ARPA: drich at dialogic.com
UNIX Systems Administrator  | UUCP: uunet!dialogic!drich
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