[SunHELP] Shell Problem

[Nicholas Dronen]

The Bourne and Korn shells set $SHELL.  The C shell sets $shell.
But perhaps we're getting ahead of ourselves.  What are you
trying to do, really?  I think I know, but you don't say
exactly.

If you want to change a user's environment from within a shell
script such that the environment will remain changed after 
the script "exits," you *must* have the user source the file
so it's run in the current shell.

Bourne and Korn shell syntax:

$ . [ file ]

C shell syntax

% source [ file ]

I think this covers the first part of your confusion.  The second
part is this: since Bourne/Korn and the C shell use different syntax
for setting environment variables, you need to know which shell
the user is using in order to know which syntax to use, but in order
to know which shell the user is using, you need to use either Bourne/Korn
shell or C shell syntax to check the SHELL or shell environment variables
(which isn't actually reliable anyway) or to run a command or whatever,
so you're pretty much stuck.

And you are stuck.

What you *should* do is require that the user *source* a shell script
that is named so they can tell which one is intended for them, say,
a C shell user.  "Hi.  I use the C shell.  I source foo.csh in order
to set environment variables for application X."

Mind you, this is just a guess.

If the values of the environment variables do not need to survive
the execution of the script, then just call the script! :)

Regards,

Nicholas Dronen

On Mon, Apr 16, 2001 at 05:23:31PM -0700, Naresh Narang wrote:
> Hi
> 
>   I want to set up env. variables based upon the shell a user is running, so in order to find what shell a user is using, I have to run a script in a Shell say /bin/sh. If I run it using #!/bin/sh to find user's shell, every shell behaves differently or if I use other methods to find shell then how do I use that shell to set env variable that can be read by user's shell and other statements are ignored. 
> 
> Basically I want a general script that can set env variables based on user's shell syntex.
> 
> Any help is appreciated.
> 
> Thanks
> Naresh
> 
> -- Naresh
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