adapted $PATH not available for GUI

[RW]

On Sun, 16 Mar 2014 14:53:38 +0100
houghi at houghi.org wrote:

> On Sun, Mar 16, 2014 at 01:06:08PM +0000, Chris Neveu wrote:
> > Adding the path in ~/.xsessionrc should accomplish what you want.
> 
> Thanks. That works and I have added it to /etc/skel so when I make a
> new (test) user, I will have it already.
> 
> Any idea why /etc/profile or any of the others are not picked up? From
> what I can deduct, there are two places that the PATH settings are
> done. One for CLI and one for GUI, which is odd and prone to security
> issues and errors.

You normally source profile files rather replicate them.


> So where does XFCE (or is it  get the PATH settings from? From what I
> understand is that XFCE takes it parameters from X and e.g.
> ~/.xsessionrc X takes the parameters from lightdm and some other
> files. lightdm takes them from the init.
> 
> So at what point does the PATH enter the stream of parameters and
> where does it read that from? It seems not to be coming from any of
> the other files. /etc/profile works on tty1, so there is no syntax
> error.


With a graphical login manager you haven't got an actual login shell,
so something else has to read in the files. Some managers can do this,
I've no idea about lightdm. ~/.xsessionrc seems as good a place as
any though.