Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!decwrl!mcnc!gatech!bloom-beacon!LARRY.MCRCIM.MCGILL.EDU!mouse
From: mouse@LARRY.MCRCIM.MCGILL.EDU
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re:  setenv DISPLAY automatically
Message-ID: <9011112317.AA21302@Larry.McRCIM.McGill.EDU>
Date: 11 Nov 90 23:17:26 GMT
Sender: daemon@athena.mit.edu (Mr Background)
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 36

> If one has many accounts on many UNIX machines running X-Windows,
> naturally he doesn't want to do  "setenv DISPLAY ..." every time he
> rlogin to a host.  How do you tell the remote host to know your
> original "DISPLAY" and set it automatically for you when you log in?

> We have figured out the way to do it for a single rlogin.  But once
> you rlogin to still another remote host, the DISPLAY becomes
> incorrect.

What I do is use a front-end to rlogin that packages up $TERM and
$DISPLAY into a single string, which is stuffed into $TERM.  rlogin
then propagates $TERM normally; my .cshrc on the remote machine
contains

	eval `xrlogind`

where xrlogind is a program that checks $TERM and if it is of the
special format it recognizes, unpacks it and spits out setenv and
unsetenv commands to recreate the environment variables.

Works like a charm, and xrlogin is smart enough to ensure that the
DISPLAY it passes to the remote end is usable there, by always
converting machine names to numeric form and handling the bare-":" and
"unix:" abbreviations appropriately.

The programs are not complicated, but they are not in shape to compile
elsewhere; they depend on local include files and library routines (and
also have an unfortunate assumption that the character set in use is
ASCII).  I can't spare the time just now to bash them into
release-ready shape, but if you want them anyway you can ftp them from
132.206.1.1, in X/xrlogin.c and X/xrlogind.c.

					der Mouse

			old: mcgill-vision!mouse
			new: mouse@larry.mcrcim.mcgill.edu