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From: jf@ap.co.umist.ac.uk (John Forrest)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Should login xterms show /etc/motd?
Keywords: xterm login
Message-ID: <1990Jul19.071452.19593@cns.umist.ac.uk>
Date: 19 Jul 90 07:14:52 GMT
References: <1990Jul18.200754.13129@cs.umn.edu>
Sender: usenet@cns.umist.ac.uk (Usenet news user)
Reply-To: jf@ap.co.umist.ac.uk (John Forrest)
Organization: UMIST Computation, Manchester, UK.
Lines: 24

In article <1990Jul18.200754.13129@cs.umn.edu>,
brsmith@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu (Brian R. Smith) writes:
|> ... would it be reasonable to augment xterm (yet again) to dump
|> /etc/motd (among other things) into its window before starting a login
|> shell?  Anyone have a patch for it?
|> 
|> I've got a crude hack set up in /etc/.login (sourced before ~/.cshrc
|> and ~/.login) right now - if "WINDOWID" is set it cats /etc/motd.
|> 

I fully agree that the /etc/motd ought to get out somehow. We run an
Apollo ring, and normally users start X if they want after logging in
(or we have set ups that do this automatically). However, we have one
node running xdm and the nett effect is that you don't see the motd!
However, I'm not sure that getting this to come out in xterm is the best
idea - can the system easily differentiate between the first and
subsequent xterms? I expect a better idea would be to pop up some sort
of window with the motd init, which could then be killed when the user
has read the stuff. Has anyone tried this?

John Forrest
Dept of Computation
UMIST.