storage location for 'GNUTERM=x11' variable?
storage location for 'GNUTERM=x11' variable?
- Subject: storage location for 'GNUTERM=x11' variable?
- From: email@hidden (Dushan Mitrovich)
- Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2008 10:55:52 -0700
Sorry for the length of this message - I couldn't think of a shorter way
to describe the puzzle.
Question in a nutshell:
Where does Tiger X.4.11 keep its environment variable assignments?
Until about two months ago I had my original X.4.7 installed and updated
to X.4.11. Also installed were X11 and Xcode, so I could use the plot-
ting program 'gnuplot' in a terminal. This worked as it was supposed to,
using either 'aqua' or 'X11' as the terminal, depending on the assignment
given to environment variable 'GNUTERM'.
Then, at the recommendation of AppleCare support (to try to get FTP work-
ing) I did an archive install of Tiger. After that a number of programs
that used to work stopped working, including 'gnuplot'. Specifically, a
request to plot, under either 'aqua' or 'X11', produced no error messages,
but also no plot window. None of the several suggestions I tried (always
logging out then back in) changed this behavior.
About two weeks ago I did a new, clean install on a separate hard disk.
This fixed almost all the problems I had with programs under the older
install, except for gnuplot, whose behavior remained unchanged.
A couple of days ago I made sure that the statements
export GNUTERM=x11
export DISPLAY=:0.0
were in /etc/bashrc and ~/.profile, and the first statement also in
/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc. Before trying these, I read an email suggestion
to try this one-liner in Terminal:
GNUTERM=x11 DISPLAY=:0.0 /Applications/Gnuplot.app/Contents/Resources/bin/gnuplot
And now gnuplot appeared in an X11 window, and the plot request worked!
To see which action was responsible for this sudden change of behavior,
I started to backtrack over the steps one by one (including logout/login).
- In Terminal, invoking gnuplot without specifying the variables still
worked.
- After commenting out the GNUTERM and DISPLAY lines in all three files,
the plotting still worked.
- Nothing I could think of would break gnuplot and keep it from plotting
in an X11 window!
So now I've got exactly the opposite problem from what I had earlier. Is
Tiger storing the variable assignments in some other place(s) that I don't
know about? Even with all references to GNUTERM commented out in the
files mentioned, on logging back in the Terminal statement 'echo $GNUTERM'
would produce 'x11'. To confirm it, I just tried it, and this time the
response was a blank line, suggesting that GNUTERM is no longer defined.
Yet invoking gnuplot still brings it up in an X11 window, and it plots
just fine.
So I'm thoroughly confused. Could somebody explain to me what in blazes
might be going on?
Thanks for your patience and thoughts.
- Dushan Mitrovich
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