Saying What You Mean
Mar 21, 2008 / By Sheeri Cabral
Ah, the perils of working in a shared, client environment. One client has us using a login that is not exclusive to us. I prefer using bash; the client is set to use zsh. This is not a problem in and of itself.
However, there is a section in the .profile that is causing me issues:
if [ -f /usr/bin/ksh ]; then
/usr/bin/ksh -o vi
exit
fi
So, “If ksh exists, run it with some options to edit history with vi-like commands”. Except what we really want is “If you’re using the ksh as a shell, . . . .”
So I added a modification, and now all is fine.
if [ -f /usr/bin/ksh ]; then
if [ "$SHELL" = "/usr/bin/ksh" ]; then
/usr/bin/ksh -o vi
exit
fi
fi
(not all my problems are MySQL related!)
Why are you starting another instance of the ksh shell if you know the current process is already a running ksh shell? You can activate the vi behavior of command history editing in the current ksh shell:
$ set -o vi
Also, just because $SHELL is set to a value doesn’t guarantee that it’s accurate. And ksh isn’t always in /usr/bin. It’d be a bit more reliable to test for `basename $0` = ksh.