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Date: Fri, 19 Jan 2007 09:25:46 +1100 (EST)
From: Luke Kendall <luke DOT kendall AT cisra DOT canon DOT com DOT au>
Subject: Re: Login shell?
To: cygwin <cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
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On 18 Jan, Thorsten Kampe wrote:
>  * Luke Kendall (Thu, 18 Jan 2007 18:03:33 +1100 (EST))
> > On 17 Jan, Thorsten Kampe wrote:
> > >  * Luke Kendall (Wed, 17 Jan 2007 13:29:31 +1100 (EST))
> > > > I just want to confirm, that the traditional Cygwin way of achieving
> > > > this same result is still to modify cygwin.bat on a PC-by-PC basis
> > > > (assuming one user per PC), rather than to take the traditional Unix
> > > > way and change the shell field in /etc/passwd?
> > >  
> > >  If you want to change your login shell you modify the passwd file.
> > 
> > That's what we do, yes, because our modified cygwin.bat runs shell.exe,
> > not bash.
>  
>  Well, that's not what you do. If you login (via ssh for instance) 
>  cygwin.bat doesn't get executed.

Good, so it's just the desktop startup for the shells that might have a
neater solution.
 
> > >  cygwin.bat is just a target for the shortcut.
> > 
> > But doesn't cygwin.bat run bash (not the shell specified in
> > /etc/passwd)?
>  
>  That correct.
>   
> > > I think the zsh 
> > >  maintainer has a batch file that creates links to start zsh instead of 
> > >  bash.
> > 
> > That sounds like it doesn't use /etc/passwd.
>  
>  mkzsh just creates a zsh.bat
>  
> > Perhaps Michael should have called shell.exe login.exe :-)
> > shell.c is only 60-odd lines long.
> > 
> > Just to be quite explicit, here is our modified cygwin.bat:
> > 
> >     @echo off
> >     C:
> >     chdir C:\cygwin\bin
> > 
> >     shell
> > 
> > It seems neater to me than the current approach.
>  
>  The neat approach is to check if your problem still exists and trying 
>  to solve it.

I think the current approach would be fine if the desktop shortcuts
were named "bash" (or "zsh" for zsh.bat), rather than Cygwin.  But for
commands like rxvt, xterm, Cygwin, it seems neater not to hard-code the
choice of shell when the choice of shell has been defined in
/etc/passwd.

Sorry, I don't think I can explain the appeal any better than that.

luke


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