Hi, for all of the users on our boxes, we have a .profile in each home directory. That's fine. But I have some PATH statements that I want to apply for ALL users once they log in. And I'm hoping not to have to edit all user's .profile files in each dir on each box.

Is there a global or team profile that I can use for this purpose?

Thanks!
Aaron

There is a file in /etc called profile, which is executed for every user that logs in. From the man page of profile:
So you can set your variables in the /etc/profile, but they will be overridden if the user sets the same variables to some different value in his/her own .profile.

Basically, we're installing some new software and we want the path to those new scripts, etc, to be in everyone's profile. But....everyone also has their own .profile, so it sounds like if I set them in /etc/.profile, they'll just be overwritten.

Someone mentioned something about a .profile_team that could be used, but I can't find anything about it.

There is a provision in ksh that allows you to set readonly variables. You can use the command typeset with the '-r' option to do so. I do not know if this can be used in this case, I am just providing you with an option that you could try out.

Also, the file is not /etc/.profile, it is /etc/profile.

A user can find a way to reset environment variables no matter what you do. Set the PATH in /etc/profile. Warn users not to remove the stuff you put in PATH. But in their own .profile, they can still do:
PATH=$PATH:/some/other/directory
and that is a good thing.

Thanks guys. Well maybe this was real simple. I thought if I have an /etc/profile, it will be overwritten with the users .profile. It sounds like they can work in conjunction.

Just in case your OS is AIX: there is a file /etc/environment, where generally set environment variables are stored in the form "variable=value". It is read prior to /etc/profile.

bakunin