Difference between .profile and local.profile

[spookie]

Hi,
Can someone tell me what is the diffrence between .profile and local.profile files for a shell account?
Since .profile file gets executed first after account login, it is used for customization but what local.prodile does?


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I never set a goal because u never know whats going to happen tommorow.

 

[KenCunningham]

As far as I know local.profile is just the 'standard' .profile copied when a user is created. It would need renaming to .profile to have any influence. See:

http://www.itworld.com/nl/unix_sys_adm/10312001/

Hope this helps.

 

[spookie]

Hi KenCunningham,
Actally i have just logged in to my account and can see both the files (.profile and local.profile).
But i don't know whether the local.profile has been saved as .profile already.
So does both the files get automatically created with the account or just local.profile, so to rename it to .profile and use it for customization?

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I never set a goal because u never know whats going to happen tommorow.

 

[KenCunningham]

What does diff .profile local.profile show you? If this is an established system I'd assume that some sort of customisation to .profile will have already been carried out.

 

[marrow]

run "diff .profile local.profile" to see if identical. My guess is that this is somebodies naming convention, could simply be "old.profile"?

An easy test would be to make a small change to the .profile, maybe add a comment and save and see what happens to the local.profile.

 

[spookie]

Hi,
Thanks for the replies.
There is no similarity between the two files.
while local.profile sets up PATH variable and export it, .profile sets up MAIL path.
I am curious.

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I never set a goal because u never know whats going to happen tommorow.

 

[Annihilannic]

The local.* files are just copies of the contents of /etc/skel which useradd puts in new users' home directories. The user can choose to use them by renaming them to .filename, or not, as they wish.

Annihilannic.