Starting a "login" version of Bash via `su` is tricky. The naive:
su - ${first_user} -c startx
fails because `su - ...` clears a number of environment variables (so
the prefixed `source /etc/profile` doesn't accomplish anything), but
Bash isn't started with the `--login` option, so it doesn't source
/etc/profile internally. From bash(1):
A login shell is one whose first character of argument zero is a -,
or one started with the --login option.
...
An interactive shell is one started without non-option arguments and
without the -c option whose standard input and error are both
connected to terminals (as determined by isatty(3)), or one started
with the -i option...
...
When bash is invoked as an interactive login shell, or as a
non-interactive shell with the --login option, it first reads and
executes commands from the file /etc/profile, if that file exists.
After reading that file, it looks for ~/.bash_profile,
~/.bash_login, and ~/.profile, in that order, and reads and executes
commands from the first one that exists and is readable. The
--noprofile option may be used when the shell is started to inhibit
this behavior.
In order to get the login-style profile loading with a non-interactive
`su` invocation, you need to use something like:
echo "${command}" | su - "${user}"
This starts a login shell and pipes the command in via stdin, which
seems to fake Bash into thinking its running from an interactive
terminal. Not the most elegant, but the other implementations I can
think of are even worse:
su - "${user}" -c "bash --login -c ${command}"
su - "${user}" -c 'source /etc/profile &&
(source .bash_profile || ...) && ${command}"
The old expression was broken anyway due to unescaped ampersands in
the sed expression. From sed(1):
s/regexp/replacement/
Attempt to match regexp against the pattern space. If successful,
replace that portion matched with replacement. The replacement
may contain the special character & to refer to that portion of
the pattern space which matched, and the special escapes \1
through \9 to refer to the corresponding matching sub-expressions
in the regexp.
This means that the old expression (with unescaped ampersands) lead
to:
source /etc/profile ##STARTX##STARTX su - ${first_user} -c startx
with ${first_user} expanded. This commented out startx, so it was
never run.
Reviewed-by: Matt Turner <mattst88@gmail.com>
# We want the first user to be used when auto-starting X
if [ -e /etc/startx ]
then
- sed -i \
- "s:##STARTX:source /etc/profile && su - ${first_user} -c startx:" \
- /root/.bashrc
+ sed -i "s:##STARTX:echo startx | su - '${first_user}':" /root/.bashrc
fi
if [ -e /lib/rcscripts/addons/udev-start.sh ]