Functions in system init scripts

[Daniel Qarras <dqarras@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

I guess this an age old problem but it bit me again after few years hiatus. Probably most compactly described by this screenshot from gnome-terminal:

localhost:~> cat /etc/profile.d/functest.sh
functest ()
{
  echo function functest defined
}
FUNCVAR=1
export FUNCVAR
localhost:~> echo $FUNCVAR
1
localhost:~> which functest
functest not found
zsh: exit 1
localhost:~> . /etc/profile.d/functest.sh
localhost:~> which functest              
functest () {
	echo function functest defined
}

What happens here is that some applications install their initialization scripts under /etc/profile.d and those get sourced via /etc/profile when a user logins (and /etc/profile is sourced by /etc/zprofile). With console sessions or ssh connections all is good.

When a user is logging via a display manager like GDM, the function definitions get "lost" as only zshenv/.zshenv/zshrc/.zshrc are getting sourced when an xterm / gnome-terminal is launched. zprofile/.zprofile are sourced during the login but only environment variable setting survive till xterm/gnome-terminal.

So the question is what would be the most optimal way to fix this? Some distributions' zsh package (e.g., Red Hat's) actually source init scripts under /etc/profile.d *twice* but that raises new problems as then a user will have hard time to override some settings in his own init scripts (and it just feel broken to do something like that twice in any case).

Thanks!



__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com