On 2008.09.26 21:38:54 -0400, "Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH"
On 2008 Sep 26, at 21:11, Devin Mullins wrote:
On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 06:04:54PM -0400, Gwern Branwen wrote:
A user's shell when invoked as /bin/sh throws away a lot of their customizations and addons; I wrote this patch for a user on #xmonad who was perplexed why some of his scripts and other shell things were simply Not Working.
Hrm, that makes sense. If you're used to some particular bash-only syntax, you might expect it to work inside spawn.
Traditional Unix behavior is that something spawned programmatically should use /bin/sh to get a consistent environment, while something spawned via user interaction should use the user's $SHELL. Quite possibly the core spawn should stay as is and the prompt one should use a new $SHELL-based spawn (note that this can be done as a wrapper around the existing spawn).
-- brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery@kf8nh.com
Sticking to hardcore traditional Unix behavior would be fine if we were unpleasant Dwm developers. We could be all 'ROFL n00b, don't u know if you don't want /bin/sh you should write your own keybinding which uses "spawnObscure"? Why would you think the default spawn would act smart and work with your existing setup?' Or, we could be friendly & helpful & make a simple 1 or 2 line change and never have to discuss it again. I don't see any real upside to the 'consistent environment' of /bin/sh; if anything, going through $SHELL is what would provide a 'consistent environment', since what the user is actually using and running in is $SHELL. -- gwern