Subject: SU and Resetting Pine Conf.

From: [email-masked] (Scott Roberts)
Date: Thu, 9 May 1996 19:25:53 GMT

Hi, everyone :)

I have an odd problem.

I have--well, had--an extensive personal configuration file with Pine, I
love the program.  I am on a Linux-based ISP, whose system administrators
are still
running Pine 3.91 (and since they are my coworkers I keep bugging them to
upgrade...hopefully they will).  I've searched the archives and the help
files and have yet to find anyone else asking about this, so I will.

When I SU out to root, if I accidentally run PINE (as I might do,
forgetting that I am root and not me) it calls up Pine and everything is
hunky-dory.  If I quit out, then exit, to become myself again, PINE treats
it as if this is my first time running pine, complete with the intro
screen.  It writes the default configuration file over my .pinerc.

The same thing happened even when I aliased pine to pine -p conffile, and
set up a conffile--it wrote over the conffile with the default pinerc.  I
don't understand this behavior, and I find it very frustrating that I
can't run pine as root and subsequently as myself without losing the
configuration.

If anyone could help me via an emailed reply (I work in tech support, and
rarely have time to read the enwsgroups as much as I should) I would be
most grateful.

Running Pine 3.91 on a Linux 1.2.13 system.

Thanks in advance,
Scott Roberts
[email-masked]

---

From: [email-masked] (Timothy P. Cheney)
Date: 10 May 1996 17:16:11 GMT

Have you tried using 'su -' instead of 'su' so that your environment
doesn't get propagated to the new shell.  But maybe you're su-ing
because you DO want to propagate your environment such as $PWD.

In that case you could alias pine to
if [ `whoami` != "root" ] ; then pine ; fi

to prevent yourself from running pine whne you're on as root.

Scott Roberts ([email-masked]) wrote:
: Hi, everyone :)

: I have an odd problem.

: I have--well, had--an extensive personal configuration file with Pine, I
: love the program.  I am on a Linux-based ISP, whose system administrators
: are still
: running Pine 3.91 (and since they are my coworkers I keep bugging them to
: upgrade...hopefully they will).  I've searched the archives and the help
: files and have yet to find anyone else asking about this, so I will.

: When I SU out to root, if I accidentally run PINE (as I might do,
: forgetting that I am root and not me) it calls up Pine and everything is
: hunky-dory.  If I quit out, then exit, to become myself again, PINE treats
: it as if this is my first time running pine, complete with the intro
: screen.  It writes the default configuration file over my .pinerc.

: The same thing happened even when I aliased pine to pine -p conffile, and
: set up a conffile--it wrote over the conffile with the default pinerc.  I
: don't understand this behavior, and I find it very frustrating that I
: can't run pine as root and subsequently as myself without losing the
: configuration.

: If anyone could help me via an emailed reply (I work in tech support, and
: rarely have time to read the enwsgroups as much as I should) I would be
: most grateful.

: Running Pine 3.91 on a Linux 1.2.13 system.

: Thanks in advance,
: Scott Roberts
: [email-masked]

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