Hitchhiker's Guide to Openbsd

8.16 - ksh(1) does not appear to read my 
.profile!
There are two likely reasons for 
ksh(1)
 to seemingly ignore a user's 
.profile
file. 
●
.profile
is not owned by the user. To fix for username, 
# chown username ~username/.profile 
●
You are using ksh(1) from within X Window System 
Under 
xterm(1)
, argv[0] for ksh(1) is not prepended with a dash ("-"). Prepending a dash to argv
[0] will cause csh(1) and ksh(1) to know they should interpret their login files. (For csh(1) that's 
.
login
, with a separate 
.cshrc
that is always run when csh(1) starts up. With ksh(1), this is 
more noticeable because there is only one startup script, 
.profile
. This file is ignored unless 
the shell is a login shell.) 
To fix this, add the line "
XTerm*loginShell: true
" to the file 
.Xdefaults
in your 
home directory. Note, this file does not exist by default, you may have to create it. 
$ echo "XTerm*loginShell: true" >> ~/.Xdefaults 
You may not have had to do this on other systems, as some installations of X Window System 
come with this setting as default. OpenBSD has chosen to follow the X.org behavior. 
8.17 - Why does my 
/etc/motd
 file get overwritten when I 
modified it?
The 
/etc/motd
file is edited upon every boot of the system, replacing everything up to, but not 
including, the first blank line with the system's kernel version information. When editing this file, make 
sure that you start after this blank line, to keep 
/etc/rc
from deleting these lines when it edits 
/etc/
motd
upon boot. 
8.20 - Antialiased and TrueType fonts in X
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq8.html (15 of 20)9/4/2011 10:02:10 AM

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8 - General Questions
See 
this document
.