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From: paulsc@orca.TEK.COM (Paul Scherf)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: login shell == ../vi
Message-ID: <2378@orca.TEK.COM>
Date: Thu, 2-Jul-87 15:11:09 EDT
Article-I.D.: orca.2378
Posted: Thu Jul  2 15:11:09 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 4-Jul-87 09:47:03 EDT
References: <10249@cgl.ucsf.EDU> <196@picuxa.UUCP>
Reply-To: paulsc@orca.UUCP (Paul Scherf)
Organization: Tektronix, Inc., Wilsonville, OR
Lines: 43
Summary: I tried it. It is not so bad.

In article <46@puffin.USS.TEK.COM> richl@penguin.USS.TEK.COM (Rick Lindsley) writes:
>In article <139@hobbes.UUCP> root@hobbes.UUCP (John Plocher) writes:
>> Am I missing something?  Why shouldn't a user be allowed to change her
>> shell to be anything she wants?  What is the difference between her running
>> a program from a shell (% /usr/local/emacs foobar) or having the program as
>> her shell (me::1000:1000:I said ME:/usr/guest:/usr/local/emacs)?

>Consider a non-professional environment, say a university. Somebody
>gets mad because their paper quota has run out, and they can't buy
>anymore. So they write a quick program that ignores keyboard generated
>signals and change their login shell. Then they log in to as many
>terminals as possible, thus locking them up until a root-type person
>can do a ps (possibly from the console) and kill them. Oh sure, he can
>only lock up maybe 20 terminals before he exceeds his process limit,
>but from the point of view of the rest of the computing environment he
>has screwed them royally ... Everyone hates him, of course, but what
>does he care? He's leaving this stupid school anyway, because school
>sucks, and .........

>Or the case of the simply naive person from ANY environment (in this
>case, on a machine with job control). They make their shell vi. Then
>they type ^Z. Ooops. Hung terminal. Find a root person. If it's after
>5, you might have to hang it up for the day.

My .profile / .cshrc was:

	exec vi program1.c

the last semester I was at school (you know, back when I was
non-professional (-: ).  I figure that works out to the same thing as
changing my shell.  It actually worked out pretty well.  I had to
":!lpr %" to print my file, or ":!cc %" to compile, ... but it really
wasn't so bad.  (I also had to ":n ~/.cshrc" when it was time to start
on program2.c. (-: )  It is also a lot less political (and, evidentally,
a lot less emotional) issue than actually changing your shell.

There were fairly tight time limits on how long one could use a
terminal at one time and the machines were pretty heavily loaded.  I
think using vi as my "shell" helped me use the terminals much more
effectively.

Paul Scherf, Tektronix, Box 1000, MS 61-033, Wilsonville, OR, USA
paulsc@orca.GWD.Tek.COM			tektronix!orca!paulsc