startup, .profile, env.vars., etc.

[Kevin Krammer]

On Thursday 29 May 2008, Ryo Furue wrote:
> Hi KDE users,
>
> I think this question comes up from time to time:  When and how are
> environmental variables set?  How are users supposed to set their own?
>
> Last time I asked this question, I eventually found that if you make a
> symbolic link in ~/.kde/env/ to your ~/.profile (or ~/.bash_profile)
> and add an extension ".sh" to the link name, then it's sourced during
> the KDE startup.  Good.

Actually any directory in the list of 
kde-config --path exe
but /bin replaced by /env

Any file with extension .sh in there is sourced by startkde, the script which 
starts a full KDE session.
I am not sure if there is an official name for this, but I call 
it "environment extender" :)

> But, today I realized that without a link in ~/.kde/env/ , my
> ~/.bash_profile is somehow sourced.  My system is the testing
> distribution of Debian, which is constantly updated, and KDE has
> been updated for a few times since I set ~/.kde/env/ , I think.
> Does that mean that KDE now sources the user's ~/.profile ?

No.
However the shell running startkde might read files during its startup, e.g. 
bash reads different files depending on if it is started as a login shell, 
non-interactive shell, interactive shell, etc.

Thus running startkde manually from a console might get you a different 
environment than having it started through KDM, GDM, etc.

> Since I first found that in konsole, I thought that my bash was invoked
> as a login shell.  But, no; the value of $0 was "/usr/bin/bash" or
> something similar, not "-bash".   Also I examined the env.vars. of
> /usr/bin/ssh-agent, which is invoked by ssh-add, which is in turn
> invoked from ~/.kde/Autostart/ , and sure enough, its
> env.vars. contained my own ones set in my .bash_profile.

In a Konsole window, or most likely any terminal emulator window, the shell 
will be invoked as a non-login interactive shell.
Again, depending on the shell there might be differences in which files it 
reads.

> This leads to another annoyance: I have launcher icons on my panels.
> I set one of them to invoke "emacs" and hoped that it would invoke
> /usr/local/bin/emacs because that's the first one in my PATH.  But,
> it invokes /usr/bin/emacs instead.  That probably means that the
> program that manages the panels (I don't know its name) doesn't get
> my env.vars.
>
> So, I'd like to know, once and for all, how these things work.  What
> should I read?

I think the safest way is to use the environment extender mechanism or to set 
the variables as a point prior to KDE startup, i.e. whereever the 
distribution sets globally used environment variables.

To check how the  variables of the KDE session are set, you can execute a 
command through "Run Command" (or ALT+F2), like this

env > /tmp/kdeenv.txt

Cheers,
Kevin
-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring
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