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From: brsmith@cs.umn.edu (Brian R. Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Should login xterms show /etc/motd?
Message-ID: <1990Jul20.180959.21846@cs.umn.edu>
Date: 20 Jul 90 18:09:59 GMT
References: <1990Jul18.200754.13129@cs.umn.edu> <678@venice.SEDD.TRW.COM>
Organization: University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, CSci dept.
Lines: 59

baur@venice.SEDD.TRW.COM (Steven L. Baur) writes:

>From article <1990Jul18.200754.13129@cs.umn.edu>, by brsmith@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu (Brian R. Smith):
>> So, would it be reasonable to augment xterm (yet again) to dump
>> /etc/motd (among other things) into its window before starting a login
>> shell?

>Absolutely not.  There is a perfectly good place to put this, and that is
>in the Xsession file run by xdm prior to login.

What about when user "george" does and "rcmd [or xrsh] foo xterm -ls".
He's now logged into foo, but he has NOT seen /etc/motd.

xterm has half of /bin/login in it already - it can update /etc/utmp
and /usr/adm/wtmp, chown the pty, etc.  Why not throw the rest in?  It
would make things much less confusing for our novice users - xterm
logins would appear nearly identical to normal terminal logins.

>> 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.

> That works only if your users don't use more modern shells :-).

Ah, but *I* am the one to install the more modern shells, so I can
hack them as I please... (evil laughter)

>What I'd like to see is a program that can take a text file
>(determine a minimum amount of screen space) and just display it with
>a button to click on when the user is done reading it.

That would be a nice solution, for xdm logins, at least.  But it still
wouldn't take care of those people using xterm to login, rather than
rlogin or telnet.

Probably the *BEST* solution came from Edward Wang
(edward@ucbarpa.berkeley.edu) - have xterm run /bin/login itself, and
not even try to update /etc/utmp and /usr/adm/wtmp.  This is essentially
what rlogind and telnetd do, so there's even precedent.

Unfortunately, this means that you must have an xterm and /bin/login
that can agree with each other.  If your login supports "-f" (which
SunOS doesn't), you can just do:

xterm +ls -e /bin/login -fp $USER

On our Sequent (Dynix 3.0.17) this works just great - it is
*identical* to an rlogin.  But no go for suns.

BUT: the 4.3bsd /bin/login supports "-f", and it IS publicly available,
so it is a workable solution.

Now the question is: Would it be reasonable to change xterm to run
"/bin/login -fp ..." for login shells?

(If you'll excuse me, I'll go bash on the xterm source for a while...
:-))

Brian
brsmith@cs.umn.edu