UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

Is it possible to set an environment variable or add something to the path for every user in a group?

I guess I mean the equivelent of going into each member's profile and adding a directory to their path var, but without physically doing that for each of them.

So just set it globally the one time for all group members so that they pick it up on login.

Thanks in advance

Steady

---------- Post updated at 08:19 PM ---------- Previous update was at 07:57 PM ----------

Guess I could have figured this out earlier

in /etc/profile I have set

Code:

[[ $(groups) == *"m_usr m_dev"* ]] && M_ROOT=/usr/local/bin/m_prog

Is there a more accepted way of doing this?

On most systems you have some sort of system-wide profile, which is called before individual profiles are called. Use the id command to get the group set of the user logging on there and implement a logic like:

Code:

if [ <group set of this user contains group X> ] ; then
     yourvar="some value" ; export yourvar
fi

I hope this helps.

bakunin

__________

PS: i just saw you figured that one out yourself. No, that is the "One True Way". ;-))

When a user with ksh as their login shell logs in, ksh executes /etc/profile and then $HOME/.profile. Your system administrator could use id -gn or id -Gn to determine if the user is a member of the group you wanted to be affected and initialize $PATH to include the directory you wanted added to every affected person's environment.

But some users may override that setting in their personal $HOME/.profile. And, other login shells may not have a global initialization file or may use files with different names.

Suppose you want a group, say gid=10 which is staff, using POSIX compliant id:

Code:

[ `id -g` -eq 10 ] && M_ROOT=/usr/local/bin/m_prog
[ "`id -gn`" = "staff"  ] && M_ROOT=/usr/local/bin/m_prog

The id command was meant for this kind of thing

Thanks Guys

That's really helpful