UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

hi,

i am a newbie unix administrator. i want to set a variable, let's say :

alias cls 'clear'

But i am not going to add this line in the .login file for every home directory of my 500+ users.

pls tell me where should i put this line in, so that all users can use this variable after login.

thank you and urgent

I see you haven't heard back - and there may well (in fact probably is) a 'proper' way to do this.

however if this is urgent....it may be possible to use a simple find -exec to locate all .login or .profile files in the filesystem and append the data.

Not ideal I guess, but it would work if you're root......

Just an idea ;-)

Isn´t it posible to create a standard .profile that is stored in a central folder reachable for all users that is included in the .profile for all users?

So at anytime you make changes for all users you only have to change that file.

I´ve seen that on an AIX Box but I´ve no more access to that box so I couldn´t figure out how they exactly implemented this feature.
Probably they just start the standart .profile and included the user´s .profile to make sure the users the users aren´t able to bypass the standart .profile.

Has anybody an idea how to implement this correctly?

Theres a file called /etc/default/login

This will set global variables for all users in addition to their own .profile

This should solve your problem (hopefully).

if you use bash, you can add variables to /etc/profile
and they will be available to all logined users.