Debian

[jeral]

I am using a program that requires it be run in a terminal. Out of several distros (Fedora Core 4, Red Hat 9 and Debian 3.1 r0a "Sarge") it works in all but Debian. For some reason, I can not get Debian to read the .bash_profile file. Any ideas would be much appreciated

Thanks

 

[chipperMDW]

Are you using a terminal eulator from within X? If so, the problem is likely that none of the shells you open from X are ever considered login shells, and thus only read the [tt]~/.bashrc[/tt].

I'm really not sure of the "preferred" way to handle the problem, but what I did (on Debian Sarge) was to create a file [tt]~/.xsession[/tt] with these contents

#!/bin/sh
export PATH="`echo 'echo $PATH' |bash -sl`"
exec x-session-manager

and made it executable. ([tt]chmod +x ~/.xsession[/tt]).

That runs a login [tt]bash[/tt] shell (change it accordingly if you don't use [tt]bash[/tt]), makes it tell you the [tt]PATH[/tt], and exports it before running your usual X session manager.


Of course, a kludgier and slightly incorrect solution is to just set the [tt]PATH[/tt] in your [tt]~/.bashrc[/tt] file.

 

[jeral]

chipperMDW

Sorry, I forgot to mention that the terminal was opened in an X window.

Where should the ~/.xsession be placed? In the home directory?

There is also perhaps another option. When I ask for the path, " echo $PATH " I get /usr/local/bin as part of the path. I could always place the program there if all else fails.

 

[chipperMDW]

[tt]~/[/tt] is shorthand for your home directory. So [tt]~/.xsession[/tt] is a file named [tt].xsession[/tt] in your home directory.

 

[jstreich]

~ and ~user (where user is a user other than yourself) is useful and powerful (if other users allow read permissions on their files or your doing something as root -- be VERY careful with root if you have root access). You could also add

source .bash_profile

to your .bashrc

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