OSXFAQ Mac OS X UNIX Tip-of-the-Day
Week 105 - Controlling Bash At Startup (18 April 2005)
by
Adrian Mayo - Editor, OSXFAQ
Tuesday - Make X11 Xterm Launch Login Shells
From Monday's tip it can be seen that Apple's Terminal.app launches a login shell while X11 xterm launches a non-login shell. To help rationalise this behaviour and get a consistent environment we can change X11 xterm to launch a login shell.
Make X11 launch login shells. Edit /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc and change the line that invokes xterm:
xterm &
to:
xterm -ls &
Alternatively, to affect only your own account, create a file ~/.xinitrc which is a copy of /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc, and make the same change.
Now X11 will start a login shell.
Even better. To ensure all xterm windows are login shells too, instead of the above create a file called ~/.Xdefaults
$ cat ~/.Xdefaults
# Default settings for X Applications
#
# xterm
XTerm*.LoginShell: True
Now xterm will start a login shell whether it is invoked by X11 on startup, or by typing 'xterm &' on the command line, or by the X11 Applications menu.
Customise the look of an xterm terminal by adding more lines to ~/.Xdefaults. For example:
XTerm*background: black
XTerm*foreground: white
XTerm*backdrop: white
XTerm*rightScrollBar: True
XTerm*ScrollBar: True
xterm*saveLines: 5000
XTerm*VT100*geometry: 100x55+10+10
(The reason X11 xterm launches non-login shells is that in most Unix systems X11 controls the root window and the correct environment has already been set up. In OS X Aqua controls the root window. Hence it is better for xterm to startup login shells so that they source the login scripts.)
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