re xdm and env vars in article aa haji haji sun fwr bv fin af mil writes i am using xdm on x r with ow and xview on sun s and sparcs running sunos prior to using xdm i used to set path and other environment variables like manpath helppath arch etc in my login file with xdm the login file doesn t get executed and therefore neither the olwm root window nor my applications know about these variables one usual suggestion is to put everything into your every time shell rc file instead of your login only one which is fair enough if you only have a few users who know what they re doing if you have several hundred users who do what the books tell them though then it s confusing at best another is to have your xterms run login shells but that still leaves the window manager and the things that get started from its menus with the wrong environment our alternative is that instead of having xdm run the client startup scripts it runs the user s favourite shell as a login shell and has it then run the rest of the startup scripts that way the user s usual environment gets set up as normal and inherited by everything you can find an almost current copy of our scripts and things in contrib edinburgh environment tar z available from the usual places george d m ross department of computer science university of edinburgh kings buildings mayfield road edinburgh scotland eh jz mail gdmr dcs ed ac uk voice fax
