zsh startup oddity

[Peter A. Castro]

On Mon, 4 Apr 2005, Luke Kendall wrote:

> On  1 Apr, Michael Wardle wrote:
>>  By what mechanism are you ensuring zsh is invoked as a login shell
>>  rather than a non-login shell?
>
> I think we were starting it via the cygwin shortcut (cygwin.bat), which
> as you have said, just runs bash --login.  IIRC, the way we were
> starting zsh was via an exec inside the user's .profile.  The trouble
> was, the .profile was not being run if Cygwin's mkdir created the
> /home mount point directory instead of Windows.
>
>>  Does $- include "i"?
>>  Does setopt show that interactive is on?
>>
>>  With Cygwin 1.5.13, zsh 4.2.4-1 and the simple shell invocation utility
>>  posted to this list on March 24 <4242381E.2020008@endbracket.net> (which
>>  sets argv[0] to "-zsh"), zsh recognizes that it is a login shell and
>>  correctly sources .zprofile.
>
> Ah!  Looks perfect!  Thanks, Michael, we'll give that a try.
>
>>  You've probably already checked these things, but I'd be surprised if
>>  this behavior was due to file permissions.
>
> We weren't surprised - we were flabbergasted!  Anyway, we'll give your
> excellent shell.c a try and see how that goes.
>
> Peter Castro replied to:
>
>>> But /etc/passwd would source $HOME/.zprofile if /home had been created
>>> by Windows Explorer.
>>
>> I am unable to reproduce this.  Are you using the zsh.bat file provided
>> or a custom startup bat file or just running the shell by itself?  Please
>> make sure you are using the '-l' option to force a login shell.  zsh has
>> greatly changed in a years time.  Please consider upgrading to a later
>> release.
>
> No, we weren't using zsh.bat.  Where does that get installed?  I can't
> find it, though I see I have zsh 4.2.4 installed from my very recent
> complete re-install.

Run 'mkzsh -A -D -P' from a bash shell and it will create zsh.bat in the
root dir and create a desktop icon as well as a Cygwin menu item.  It's a
very simply bat file, like cygwin.bat itself.

> I like the sound of Michael's shell.c because you don't need a separate
> ..bat file to start up each different shell.

I guess I don't understand how you are starting the shell, really.  All
you need to do is change cygwin.bat to run 'zsh -l -i' instead of 'bash
--login' and it will run as a login shell.  /zsh.bat is simply a
convenient bat file which does this.  It seems like overkill to run a
cygwin shell wrapper which just does an exec of another shell, but to
each their own.  If it works for you, so much the better.

> Thanks for the suggestions,
> luke

-- 
Peter A. Castro <doctor@fruitbat.org> or <Peter.Castro@oracle.com>
 	"Cats are just autistic Dogs" -- Dr. Tony Attwood

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