.ssh/environment equivalent in dropbear

[Rob Landley]

On Sunday 26 August 2007 8:29:26 am Christoph Kurrat wrote:

> The busybox uses ash, but an .ash* file does not exist.
> If I create the .ashrc and export ENV=/var/tmp/.ashrc it works, but to
> export ENV, I again need the /etc/profile.

Um...  What?  I _think_ you just said "If I put it in ~/.ashrc it works".  In 
which case: happy to hear it.  In which case where does the need 
for /etc/profile come in?

> This works, but only with ssh, not with scp, due to the missing login.
>
> I found this sentence at
> http://www.busybox.net/lists/busybox/2005-February/013688.html
>
> "Environment variables set in a shell script will not have any effect to
> any parent process."

Except it's child processes you're worrying about here, not parent processes.

That limitation has nothing to do with shells, it has to do with the way unix 
processes work.  When you exec a process you pass in a new environment to it 
along with the command line arguments.  A parent can pass its existing 
environment variables to a child (it's not _obligated_ to, but generally 
does), but the parent can't modify the child's environment _after_ exec, and 
the child can't modify the parent's environment either.  They're separate 
processes, they can't reach in and fiddle with each other's internals.

So if the shell sources a chunk of shell script before running a child 
process, it can pass exported variables on to that child process.

> I think this is my problem, because the $PATH in an ssh session seems to be
> a different one than the $PATH I get executing echo $PATH without logging
> in.

If $PATH is blank I believe ash sets it to _PATH_STDPATH out 
of /usr/include/paths.h which is "/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin".

Rob
-- 
"One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code."
  - Ken Thompson.