From: Keith M. <kei...@us...> - 2012-11-30 12:37:20
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On 30 November 2012 03:30, Renato Silva wrote: > My /etc/profile was overwritten in the update. This is correct, expected behaviour. > If it wasn't [for] the previous version feature from Windows, it > would have been lost. I sympathise, (and I'm pleased that you had a backup), but I do feel obliged to point out that you are the victim of your own PEBKAC here. > My modifications to /etc/profile were ... Entirely inappropriate. As a distributable system component, the prerogative for modifying this file lies with the project maintainer. As a user, you have neither any need to, nor should you modify this file; there are four legitimate hooks available to you, which are completely adequate to achieve any level of customisation you may require, without any need for you to abuse this prerogative of the maintainer: 1) Make your customisations in $HOME/.bash_profile, for those which are to apply to bash --login sessions; 2) Make customisations in $HOME/.profile, for sh --login sessions; (these will also apply for bash --login, IFF you don't furnish $HOME/.bash_profile); 3) Specify non-login shell customisations in $HOME/.bashrc; (note that these will not apply to login shells, unless you also source $HOME/.bashrc in $HOME/.profile and/or $HOME/.bash_profile, as appropriate); 4) If user-specific customisations aren't sufficient, add a custom hook script, (or more than one, if you prefer), in /etc/profile.d; (anything you place here is your's to maintain, in perpetuity, and will be sourced by /etc/profile at login shell invocation). > one for MinGW/MSYS not taking precedence over Windows utilities with > same name in PATH (such as find), Well, each to his own; I would always prefer the MSYS "find" to the crippled ersatz "grep" which Microsoft call "find" :), but I would most likely have used $HOME/.profile or $HOME/.bash_profile, to implement a start-up hook such as this. > and another for sourcing a script to circumvent a timezone bug. The natural way to accomplish that would, surely, have been just to drop that script into /etc/profile.d, (a directory, which you may have needed to create), whence /etc/profile would have sourced it, without any change in /etc/profile itself. > What else is at the risk of having been get overwritten? Anything else you may have modified inappropriately. -- Regards, Keith. |