FS#9167 - xdm does not read PATH variable from /etc/profile when started from inittab

Attached to Project: Arch Linux
Opened by Christian Schmidt (mucknert) - Saturday, 12 January 2008, 08:20 GMT
Last edited by Jan de Groot (JGC) - Saturday, 21 June 2008, 14:07 GMT
Task Type Bug Report
Category Packages: Extra
Status Closed
Assigned To Alexander Baldeck (kth5)
Architecture All
Severity Low
Priority Normal
Reported Version 2007.08-2
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 1
Private No

Details

The package xorg-xdm does, in its vanilla configuration that comes with the package, not read PATH from /etc/profile but uses hardcoded fallbacks instead. Since /etc/profile is the de-facto standard for setting PATH under Arch, it should use those values.
This task depends upon

Closed by  Jan de Groot (JGC)
Saturday, 21 June 2008, 14:07 GMT
Reason for closing:  Fixed
Comment by Florian Hanisch (and_this_day) - Monday, 14 April 2008, 20:32 GMT
This is very annoying. Just spent again an hour to find out, why I got such a weird $PATH.
To be precise: one can set the PATH that xdm exports in /etc/X11/xdm-config (DisplayManager*userPath:, DisplayManager*systemPath).

Work around for this problem is to start the startup script ($HOME/.xsession) in a login shell, than everything gets exported in the right way. See below.

/etc/X11/xdm/Xsession: change the lines

[...]
if [ -s "$startup" ]; then
if [ - x "$startup" ]; then
exec "$startup"
else
exec /bin/sh "$startup"
fi
else
[...]

to

[...]
if [ -s "$startup" ]; then
exec /bin/sh -ls -c "$startup"
else
[...]

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