Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!dik
From: dik@cwi.nl (Dik T. Winter)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: make importing SHELL
Message-ID: <7657@boring.cwi.nl>
Date: 1 Oct 88 16:12:37 GMT
References: <452@alice.marlow.uucp> <67870@sun.uucp> <67925@sun.uucp> <128@cetia.UUCP> <13753@mimsy.UUCP> <4147@bsu-cs.UUCP> <7350@rpp386.Dallas.TX.US> <4164@bsu-cs.UUCP>
Organization: CWI, Amsterdam
Lines: 25

In article <4164@bsu-cs.UUCP> dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) writes:
 > In article <7350@rpp386.Dallas.TX.US> jfh@rpp386.Dallas.TX.US (The Beach Bum)
 > writes:
 > >$SHELL is useful for programs which support escapes to the user's shell
 > >and shell commands from within the program.  in those situations the user
 > >should get the desired shell and #! would not have added in doing the
 > >right thing.
 > 
 > This information is already available in /etc/passwd and, with the help
 > of the dbm routines in 4.3BSD, available very quickly.
 > 
 > I'll admit that on rare occasions a user might want to override this
 > information, and $SHELL might be a way to do this.
 > 
This need not be so very rare.  What if I come up with a nice new shell
that is not listed in /etc/shells?  It will not be available through
/etc/passwd.  (Yes I have done such a things; during a long time my
loginshell was /bin/sh and .profile started with the equivalent of
	SHELL=nice-new-shell
	exec $SHELL
So there.)
-- 
dik t. winter, cwi, amsterdam, nederland
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