Re: (OT) path_helper [was Re: Xterm not reading dotfiles]
Re: (OT) path_helper [was Re: Xterm not reading dotfiles]
- Subject: Re: (OT) path_helper [was Re: Xterm not reading dotfiles]
- From: Merton Campbell Crockett <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 18 Nov 2007 09:08:25 -0800
On 18 Nov 2007, at 08:17:31, Andrew J. Hesford wrote:
On Nov 18, 2007, at 10:03 AM, Merton Campbell Crockett wrote:
On 18 Nov 2007, at 07:29:05, Andrew J. Hesford wrote:
Funny you should mention this. I don't ordinarily use bash, but I
do use the LaTeXiT program, which tends to hang in Leopard when it
attempts to compile code. After some poking around, I discovered
that it was compiling the code by execing a bash login shell to
run the commands it needed. This was the culprit.
For some reason, when bash is invoked in this manner, it calls the
path_helper script, which locks everything up. If you remove the
call to path_helper in /etc/profile, and set your path manually,
you might find that bash --login does not freeze.
Interesting. During the past week, I noticed that /bin/sh invoked /
bin/bash. This resulted in /etc/bashrc, ~/.bash_profile, and /etc/
profile being read and used but not ~/.profile.
As relatively few people other than myself use the system, I moved
my $PATH modifications to /etc/profile. Even here I encountered a
problem with my "export PATH" statement: It wouldn't include all
of the elements in the path if the $PATH element wasn't the last
element in the new PATH.
I did some fooling around with bash again. I wanted /usr/libexec/
path_helper to work, even if I'm using LaTeXiT. It turns out there
is an issue with pre-set paths when calling path_helper from bash.
If I set a short default path BEFORE bash calls path_helper,
everything works. But having bash inherit my path before running the
script causes havoc. I'm going to get to the bottom of this and
hopefully get a fix to Apple...
My bad! After responding to your post, I looked at the environment
for Terminal.app and noticed it had duplicate entries in the PATH
environment variable. This led to looking at the path_helper man page
and /etc/profile.
It appears that I had modified /etc/profile under Mac OS X 10.4. When
upgrading to Mac OS X 10.5, the modified /etc/profile was preserved
and the new Mac OS X 10.5 version was installed as /etc/
profile.system_default.
As a result, I never saw the "freeze" that you and several others have
reported. It makes one wonder how many of the X "problems" are
related to how, sans adequate documentation, users addressed problems
in earlier versions of Mac OS X.
As an aside, were /usr/libexec/path_helper to function as described in
the man pages, I would have little need for ~/.bash_profile or
~/.profile other than to add the paths required to use MacPorts.
Merton Campbell Crockett
email@hidden
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