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From: cherny@abacus.Colorado.EDU (Stacey Cherny)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Help: xon executed from menus doesn't work
Message-ID: <1991Jan8.042121.15255@csn.org>
Date: 8 Jan 91 04:21:21 GMT
References: <1991Jan5.034237.5337@csn.org>
Sender: news@csn.org
Reply-To: cherny@abacus.Colorado.EDU (Stacey Cherny)
Organization: IBG, University of Colorado, Boulder
Lines: 50
Nntp-Posting-Host: elegans.colorado.edu

In article <1991Jan5.034237.5337@csn.org>, I write:
|> I've been having a very strange problem with X11R4, xdm,
|> and xon executed from a menu and would really appreciate
|> any insights into this problem that anybody may have.  Here is
|> the problem:
|> 
|> I've defined various commands to be executed from the pop-up up
|> menus which I've set in my .twmrc (and .mwmrc) file(s).  All
|> commands work fine, except the ones which use xon.  So if I try
|> something like 'xon host xterm &' as a command from the menu,
|> nothing happens.  If I type this in an xterm, it works fine.
|> Commands with xon which appear in my .xsession file get ignored
|> also.  However, if I source the .xsession file from an xterm,
|> those commands work.  This problem does not occur when I'm
|> running the same setup files under R3 on an Xstation, but only
|> occurs on displays which have xdm running on them.  The problem
|> occurs on a DECstation 2100 running R4 and an RS6000 running R3
|> but also using xdm.  It didn't occur on the IBM 6000 until I
|> installed xdm.  It doesn't occur on a DECstation which is running
|> DEC's R3 server and Xprompter.
|> 
|> If anybody has any ideas, I would really appreciate hearing them.
|> 
|> Thanks.
|> 

Well, the problem has been solved.  Thanks to all for the many
helpful suggestions.  It turned out that the problem was with xon
itself, in that in the rsh command that it ultimately executes,
it was redirecting output in an invalid way.  When I was running
xdm, the second exec below was beening executed, while when not
running xdm, the first one below was the one to be executed.  My
.xsession in run under /bin/csh and is only run when using xdm.
When xon was working, the SHELL was tcsh, when it wasn't, it was
csh.

 case ${SHELL-/bin/csh} in
   *csh )
     exec $rshell $host $rshopts -n \
       exec /bin/csh -cf "\"setenv DISPLAY $DISPLAY; setenv TERM xterm;\
                        exec $command\" < /dev/null >& /dev/null"
      ;;
   * )
     exec $rshell $host $rshopts -n \
       exec /bin/csh -cf "\"setenv DISPLAY $DISPLAY; setenv TERM xterm;\
                        exec $command\" < /dev/null > /dev/null 2>&1"
       ;;
    esac

Thanks again to all who responded.