OpenSUSE 11.3 "Teal" /bin/tcsh ignoring .login

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1

I just installed 11.3 on a little laptop and I can’t get tcsh to load my .login file.

I set the machine to come up in “runlevel 3” – Multi-User mode, console logins only

I changed my shell to /bin/csh:

% chsh -s /bin/csh
Password:
Shell changed

(/bin/csh is a link to tcsh)

I added some lines to ~/.login:

echo "login IN"
setenv X "asdf"
setenv Y "qwer"
echo "login OUT"

and to .cshrc:

echo "cshrc IN"
alias wert poiu
alias gfsd xnms
echo "cshrc OUT"

There is no ~/.tchrc file.

When I log in, all I see is:

cshrc IN

None of the environment variables are set, and the all aliases are.

The tcsh man page says pretty clearly both these files should be sourced on login, in this order:

  1. /etc/csh.cshrc
  2. /etc/csh.login
  3. ~/.tcshrc or ~/.cshrc
  4. ~/.history
  5. ~/.login
  6. ~/.cshdirs

There is some mention in the man page about the order in which the ~/.login file is sourced, but the version of tcsh here is compiled to source the ~/.login file before the ~/.cshrc file:

% tcsh --version
tcsh 6.17.00 (Astron) 2009-07-10 (i586-suse-linux) options wide,nls,lf,dl,al,kan,sm,color,filec

The “lf” item there is the LOGINFIRST option, which indicates the ~/.login file should be sourced before the ~/.cshrc file, and would change the order listed above, which came from the man page.

I checked “ps” as well, just to make sure I wasn’t in some sub-process. My csh process has a “-” in front of it, which usually means that is a login process.

If I switch back to /bin/sh (a link to bash) and put similar lines in my ~/.profile and ~/.bashrc, they work as expected:

bashrc IN
bashrc OUT
profile IN
profile OUT

So… have I covered all the bases? Is there anything else I should be looking at before I decide tcsh is broken?

There is little substantial difference between bash and tcsh these days. Should I just give up on tcsh and switch to bash?

2

What happens if you do:

csh -l

does it read ~/.login?

I don’t have 11.3 on this machine so I’m testing with 11.2 and csh -l reads ~/.login fine. In fact I discovered some settings in my ~/.login from about 13 years ago, when I last used csh on a Sun host. :open_mouth:

3

Yes:

cshrc IN
cshrc OUT
login IN
login OUT
4

Hmm, on 11.2, it worked for me. I changed a test user’s shell to /bin/csh, put an echo line in .login and ssh user@localhost and it was printed out.

5

I’m seeing this work correctly on an 11.2 system here we’ve not yet upgraded. (With tcsh version 6.15)

I’m starting to think this is either a problem with how SUSE 11.3 is starting the tcsh login shell or a problem with tcsh (version 6.17) itself.

Getting my aliases converted over to bash is turning into a pain. I’m leaning toward just putting all my stuff in ~/.cshrc (which is WRONG and irritates me) and just getting on with my life.

6

Put something like this in .cshrc

if is-login-shell
source ~/.login
endif

I forgot what the test is for a login shell, but I’m sure a search will find it.