UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Interesting. That suggests a direction to take, at least.

Try reading through the file /etc/profile .

I too don't think that $USER is a standard environment variable, so something must be setting the value. I have seen it in Unix SV but it was set in /etc/profile - not anywhere covert.

Also look at "man 1 login" and "man 5 environ" where there are descriptions of standard environment variables.

---------- Post updated at 23:04 ---------- Previous update was at 23:00 ----------

Further to post #2 (citaylor).

Better to take defaults to find out the environment:

Code:

remsh target_host -l login_name env

Hmmm...this implies that $USER is BSD, whilst LOGNAME is Sys V. HP-UX is historically probably one of the more strict Sys V O/S (they never did give in to things like the BSD format "ps" did they ?)

To my mind Berkeley unix is real unix.

Every unix SV I have encountered has hidden Berkeley syntax options. This includes HP-UX. You can get Berkeley "ps" output from "HP-UX" without installing any additional software.

If I may make a sweeping generalisation here ... any commands to do with hardware, memory, and filesystems are not portable across disparate unix platforms.
The Posix evangalists may differ ... but I live in the real world.