Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi everyone.
I am new to the forums and new to Unix, so please pardon my beginner "status".

In my company, we have a few C shell scripts, which we call BAT files (!). They all start with the usual "#/bin/csh" line to get it to run the .cshrc script which preloads the session with a lot of environment variables.

At the end of the login script, we call another script which runs a menu system and effectively calls a system which was written in house (written in Powerhouse).

When our powerhouse system submits a script using the 'at' command, we've noticed it fires up the user's .cshrc script which is then trying to fire up the menu.

Is there a way (and we've tried using '-f' without knowing why!!), to submit scripts with the 'at' command, where it can tell the .cshrc script NOT to submit the call to run the menu system?

In VMS (oooh... yes I am an original VAX VMS man), I know from past experience that you can tell the login scripts (login.com) to trap if the login script was executed "interactively" or in "batch". If it was in "batch" it would skip calls to interactive menu commands and calls to force the users to run a menu!

With Unix, we are not able to achieve this. Is there an system environment variable that can say whether the login session was executed at the terminal or via an 'at' command?

Thanks in advance...

-sp-

First off, please use the man pages - they aren't as easy to move around in as VMS help pages, but still have plenty of info (ex-VAX/VMS system manager too).

Make sure you are using #!/bin/csh versus #/bin/csh (which is what you posted).


csh -f This is to do a fast start - it is suppose to read neither the .cshrc file, nor the .login file (if a login shell) upon startup. So this SHOULD work for you.

In the man page for csh you should find the following:
prompt The string an interactive C shell prompts with. Noninteractive shells leave the prompt variable unset. Aliases and other commands in the .cshrc file that are only useful interactively, can be placed after the following test
`if ($?prompt == 0) exit` to reduce startup time for noninteractive shells.

Read the man page csh for more info. Then post back any questions.