Bug 62086 – xinit forces .xinitrc to run with /bin/sh

• Status: RESOLVED FIXED
• Product: Gentoo Linux

[Description Carlo von Loesch 2004-08-29 04:17:10 UTC]

When the .xinitrc has mode +x, xinit will traditionally exec the script rather
than launch /bin/sh on it. So you can use perl or in my case a #!/bin/tcsh
with the purpose of having all my tcsh environment variables properly set up
for all X applications.

With the current /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc this feature is broken.


Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. put #!/usr/bin/perl in your .xinitrc
2. xinit

Actual Results:  
syntax errors because /bin/sh cannot parse perl


I changed /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc like this, and thus fixed the bug:


if [ -f "$HOME/.xinitrc" ]; then
        XINITRC="$HOME/.xinitrc"
        if [ -e $XINITRC ]; then
                # if the x bit is set on .xinitrc
                # it means the xinitrc is not a
                # shell script but something else
                exec $XINITRC
        fi
        exec /bin/sh $XINITRC
# If not present, try the system default
...

[Comment 1 Donnie Berkholz (RETIRED) 2006-04-19 22:30:45 UTC]

Fixed, finally! In xinit-1.0.2-r1.