Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wasatch!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!auspex!guy
From: guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Environment variables at login
Keywords: environment login
Message-ID: <1881@auspex.auspex.com>
Date: 6 Jul 89 22:25:57 GMT
References: <956@gara.une.oz> <1623@uwbull.uwbln.UUCP>
Reply-To: guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris)
Organization: Auspex Systems, Santa Clara
Lines: 18

>And now my question for the wizards:  will the problem of setting up an
>uniform process environment for any interactive and/or non-interactive
>use be solved in a more elegant fashion in SysVR5 or in some BSD
>version?

S5R3.1 already has a mechanism to do that - you put entries of the form

	VARIABLE=value

in "/etc/TIMEZONE" (a comment in the code says the name should be
changed in S5R4; presumably the name indicates that it was intended to
be used to set TZ, but it can set more than just TZ, so presumably the
intent was to change the name to reflect that) and "init" sets up the
environment of everything it spawns (except, apparently, for the
single-user shell) with those values (max of 6 values, at least in
S5R3.1).

That's what the code seems to do, anyway; try it and see.