UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Firstly, thank you for this great forum and the time you spend on answering newbies like me.

I still have a problem with understanding how profiling works on a solaris 2.6 unix system.

when adding a user, it should get a profile in /home I suppose.
And again, I suppose that this is the file that contains the PATH for that particular user, right ?
So I checked my /home directory as superuser (su) and found nothing.
Now I VI the etc/passwd file and find some data's in there but nothing in accordance with the 'echo $PATH' print...
What am I missing here ?
As a matter of fact, I must edit the path in order for configure to work as I try deseperately to compile a courier imap server for my system and gcc is not found and..... and.....

Thanks you for your help

I forgot to mention that if I try to change the PATH with :
PATH=$PATH:/new/path/to/add
I get this answer :
Bad : modifier in $ (

So I am stuck with PATH modifications...

Sounds like you are using csh, tcsh or some variant. Try changing the path as follows:

set path=(/usr/sbin/ $path)

Stick this in your .login or .cshrc file.

So I found it...thanks to you.
For info, on this solaris spark 26, su path is changeable in /etc/default/su and/or in etc/default/login.

Now, another slight difficulty : when I am in a directory, let's say usr/local and I call a file in that directory I get a file not found. But if I state the full path to it, it works.
I'll try to resolve that one.
If anyone has a hint ? most welcome

Thanks again

You need to have . in your path. . specifies the current directory.

But it may be a security risk, especially if you run a command while you're in a world-writeable directory, such as /tmp... you might end up running something you don't want to run!

Agreed. root should never have . in their path. Probably ok for normal users, as long as it is at the end of the path statement, not the beginning.