xwin-xdg-menu terminal not picking up my environment

[Jon Turney]

On 21/05/2017 18:18, petercon@sdf.org wrote:
> The xwin-xdg-menu's terminal does not seem to pick up the environment
> variables I have set in my home directory when I use it's terminal to run
> a non-x program from /bin. i.e. I added Midnight Commander to the
> xwin-xdg-menu (using alacarte)  seting /bin/mc as the executable and check
> the "run in terminal?" box. I prefer to use joe or nano as the editor in
> mc and have turned off mc's internal editor which picks up the editor in
> the "EDITOR" environment variable which I set in ~/.bashrc (I also tried
> setting it in ~/.bash_profile and ~/.profile). Mc comes up with vi (which
> is the default in mc if no "EDITOR" environment variable is set). I can
> run an XTerm from the xwin-xdg-menu and then launch mc from that and it
> honors the "EDITOR" environment variable.
> 
> By the way if I shell out (Ctrl-O) from mc and execute "env" the "EDITOR"
> variable shows up in the list. Weird. So where does xwin-xdg-menu's
> terminal get it's environment from?
xwin-xdg-menu shouldn't be doing anything to the environment, and 
especially not based on if it's running a terminal...

If you're starting it from the start menu item, it inherits the 
environment from the login shell which that uses to run startxwin, and 
the processes it starts inherit that environment in turn.

The behaviour of bash in this area is complex (see the section 
"INVOCATION" in the man page), but I suspect that any other 
non-interactive shells in the ancestry of the mc process won't have run 
startup scripts. So, if you've made a change to bash startup files, 
you'd need to restart xwin-xdg-menu to see a change.


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