[143] in athena10
Re: The default prompt
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Timothy G Abbott)
Sat Mar 29 13:15:03 2008
Date: Sat, 29 Mar 2008 13:14:10 -0400 (EDT)
From: Timothy G Abbott <tabbott@MIT.EDU>
To: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@mit.edu>
cc: linerva@mit.edu, debathena@mit.edu, athena10@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <D2B89869-49A7-46DD-903D-538CDA1340BF@mit.edu>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64L.0803291304071.30138@vinegar-pot.mit.edu>
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On Sat, 29 Mar 2008, Jonathan Reed wrote:
>>
>> - set the "interactive" shell variable.
>
> What do we gain from removing this? The reason it's there (as far as I know)
> is because some people insist on doing things in their .cshrc.mine that
> generate output. When done in non-interactive shells, this causes things
> like Dreamweaver's built-in FTP client (which is supported by IS&T for
> uploading web pages to Athena) to barf with an amazingly non-useful error
> message. I mean, we can say "Don't do that", and we already do, but if we
> remove this, people who have gone to the effort to make sure that they're
> doing it "right" may start losing.
>
> Someone who knows more about this should feel free to correct me.
The main motivation would be to clean up the the Athena system dotfiles
by removing questionable customizations.
Checking more carefully on Google, it seems that "$?interactive" is a
common paradigm for deciding whether scripts are interactive (even though
the information comes from $?prompt; I don't really understand why this is
done this way).
Regardless, it sounds like the "interactive" variable is something that
OLC gives out as a way to make things work and unlike CDPATH, setting the
interactive variable is unlikely to have any negative utility for users.
So, it's probably best to leave it.
-Tim Abbott
