Re: screen 4.0.3-5 does not respect $SHELL

[Eric Blake <eblake at redhat dot com>]

On 10/13/2010 09:22 AM, Andrew Schulman wrote:
> > On 12/10/2010 18:00, Andrew Schulman wrote:
> > > > Initially SHELL=/bin/bash when using a link in start menu.From initial bash prompt, i start screen, fresh session. There all kinds of bash misbehavior occur, including ~/.bashrc having no effect. Apparent reason for that is that $SHELL becomes /bin/sh instead of /bin/bash within screen.
> > > > A workaround is to start screen asscreen -s /bin/bashor have shell specified in .screenrc. Then bash works as expected. That screen does not respect $SHELL seems to be a bug though.
> > > > Thanks to jturney from #cygwin for helping me pinpoint the problem.
> > > > -anna 		 	   		
> >
> > The problem seems to be caused by the fact that bash sets SHELL, but does not
> > export it by default, so screen doesn't inherit it and sets SHELL=/bin/sh.
>
> OK, I see.  And I do export SHELL in my bash startup scripts, so I don't have
> this problem.
>
> I can see two possible solutions:
>
> (1) Tell users to export SHELL=/bin/bash if that's what they want processes
> spawned by the shell to use.
>
> (2) Add 'shell /bin/bash' into /etc/screenrc, on the theory that this should be
> the default since bash is the default shell for Cygwin.  Users who wanted to use
> a different shell could override it in their .screenrc files.

(3) teach upstream screen that it should use getpwent() and honor the 
pw_shell entry for the user, rather than relying on $SHELL

--
Eric Blake   eblake@redhat.com    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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