make importing SHELL

[Dik T. Winter]

In article <4164 at bsu-cs.UUCP> dhesi at bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) writes:
 > In article <7350 at rpp386.Dallas.TX.US> jfh at rpp386.Dallas.TX.US (The Beach Bum)
 > writes:
 > >$SHELL is useful for programs which support escapes to the user's shell
 > >and shell commands from within the program.  in those situations the user
 > >should get the desired shell and #! would not have added in doing the
 > >right thing.
 > 
 > This information is already available in /etc/passwd and, with the help
 > of the dbm routines in 4.3BSD, available very quickly.
 > 
 > I'll admit that on rare occasions a user might want to override this
 > information, and $SHELL might be a way to do this.
 > 
This need not be so very rare.  What if I come up with a nice new shell
that is not listed in /etc/shells?  It will not be available through
/etc/passwd.  (Yes I have done such a things; during a long time my
loginshell was /bin/sh and .profile started with the equivalent of
	SHELL=nice-new-shell
	exec $SHELL
So there.)
-- 
dik t. winter, cwi, amsterdam, nederland
INTERNET   : dik at cwi.nl
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