export and alias lines in /etc/profile lead to unstartable GNOME session

[Florian Effenberger]

For command line tools, I often add

export ftp_proxy="http://my.proxy:3128"
export http_proxy="http://my.proxy:3128"
export https_proxy="http://my.proxy:3128"
alias ls="ls --color"

to /etc/profile. Beginning with 8.04, the GNOME session can't start in this case anymore, I only get a terminal in the failsafe mode. Worked fine with 7.04. Maybe a parsing problem?

[Florian Effenberger (floeff)]

Might be related to Bug #48876

[Dereck Wonnacott (dereck)]

Try ' instead of "

alias ls='ls --color'

[Mackenzie Morgan (maco.m)]

Can you comment out the ls alias and try to reproduce it?

[spliffster (spliffster)]

I am the original reporter of Bug #48876. It has been fixed and now it's there again. I guess it is caused by sloppy shell scripting in xinit and the such.

Check the following comment in Bug #48876
> Matthew Wang wrote on 2006-08-05: (permalink)
-- quote --
I encountered this problem in 6.06 today. If you have set 'ls' as an alias with argument '--color' in /etc/profile or $HOME/profile, it will be triggered.

The root cause is that, the script /etc/gdm/Xsession will source /etc/profile and $HOME/.profile, then it use "ls $1" to read /etc/X11/Xsession.d, the ANSI color control characters in its output will cause the problem.

Here's the fix: modify /etc/gdm/Xsession, change line 82
    for F in $(ls $1); do
to
   for F in $(/bin/ls $1); do
-- quote --