Re: .bashrc is sourced even for non-interactive shells (when run from sshd)

[Chet Ramey]

On 6/3/12 4:25 AM, Pierre Gaston wrote:

> I thought I was not documented (before 4 it was a bit less obvious
> to find the relevant bit) that's why I gave the link, but it is in
> fact documented.
> Eg in the bash 4 manual:
> 
>       Bash attempts  to determine  when it is  being run  with its
>       standard input  connected to  a network connection,  as when
>       executed by  the remote shell  daemon, usually rshd,  or the
>       secure shell  daemon sshd.  If  bash determines it  is being
>       run  in this fashion,  it reads  and executes  commands from
>       ~/.bashrc  and  ~/.bashrc,  if  these files  exist  and  are
>       readable.
> 
> If I'm not mistaken this feature is inherited from csh. I can
> guess some people are using it since there is this workaround
> testing for the SSH variables to make it work with openssh>5.

That's not exactly it, but the idea is right.  isnetconn() (previously
issock()) has been around since bash-1.13.  If I had to guess, I'd say
late August 1992 or 1993.  It wasn't inherited from csh.  The original
requests were along the lines of having something to set the remote
environment when running rsh or rcp. As you can see, this long predates
ssh.

As ssh became more popular, there were different ways to accomplish the
same thing (e.g., put BASH_ENV=startup-file into ~/.ssh/environment), but
there were still requests to leave the feature in bash.  It's still there
today.

Chet

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, ITS, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/