Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!dino!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!iuvax!sahayman
From: sahayman@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (Steve Hayman)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.ultrix
Subject: Re: global .login for cshrc
Keywords: /etc/csh.login
Message-ID: <69060@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu>
Date: 31 Oct 90 17:09:40 GMT
References: <3579@vela.acs.oakland.edu> <2800@dali>
Organization: Computer Science Department, Indiana University
Lines: 31

>Many's the time I'd like to
>add a new directory to everybody's path, and other things like that, and
>it's a  pain to notify everybody that the should manually add lines...

One way out is to have a path-setting command.  If everyone has something
like this in their .cshrc:

    setenv PATH $HOME/bin:`/bin/path`

and /bin/path is a simple script that outputs whatever you want the
default path to be:

    #!/bin/sh

    echo /usr/local/bin:/usr/bin/X11:/usr/ucb:/bin:/usr/bin


then you just need to change /bin/path when you add a new directory.
Of course it's a bit of work to get everyone to use this but
it may pay off in the long run.

You can also use a fancier scheme if you want different "kinds" of
paths - one set of paths for administrative shell scripts, etc etc.
maybe your shell scripts all begin with

    PATH=`/bin/path admscript` export PATH

you could have /bin/path output various different paths depending
on its first argument.  So users get one path, scripts get 
another, etc etc, and all you ever have to fool around with is
one file, /bin/path.