Re: A bit of Linux advice yet again??

"Howard J. Rogers" <howardjr2000_at_yahoo.com.au> wrote in news:%kV_9.38366$jM5.97308_at_newsfeeds.bigpond.com and I quote:

> I was following my old instructions for SuSe 7.1, where .profile worked,
> but I now realise the error of my ways in hoping that the same operating
> system would work the same way, regardless of the distro!
>

One thing: bash is very specific to Linux. And to some distributions. If you want to make sure your code will always behave the same way, then stick to Unix-standard shells. That means bourne shell and Korn shell. Both of these use .profile and will work exactly the same across every single Unix flavour you can imagine.

With all respect to Linux users, bash is not yet a standard in the Unix world. Hence the probs you're having. It's much better if you standardise all your scripts in a shell that can be found everywhere. The one I found to be universal is the Korn shell, or "ksh" for short. Nowadays even the ubiquitous bourne-shell has been stuffed up, namely by HP with their "posix shell"! Ksh is pretty much the same everywhere and always works the same way. Which means: "predictable".

Having said that, if you have a .profile and a .bash_profile, run the .profile from inside the other one, using the ". " convention and you should be right. You can always find a way of keeping things the same in the Unix world! ;)

-- 
Cheers
Nuno Souto
nsouto_at_optusnet.com.au.nospam