Open System Services Management and Operations Guide (G06.25+, H06.03+)

Managing With the Shell
Open System Services Management and Operations Guide—527191-002
9-4
Setting Up an /etc/profile File
For example, the time values used by an OSS shell default to those of the system that
the shell runs on. If you maintain an OSS environment for users in a time zone other
than that used for your Guardian environment, you can add the TZ environment
variable to /etc/profile to make the time zone for your OSS users appropriate to
their location. The following entry would be appropriate for California users of a node
located in New York City:
export TZ=:PST-8PDT-7,M4.5.0,M10.5.0
See the environ(5) reference page either online or in the Open System Services
System Calls Reference Manual for the format of the TZ environment variable.
Setting the MANPATH environment variable can be very important if your system has
third-party or open source reference page (man page) source files in any of the
/usr/local/man/man* directories but you have not installed an nroff or troff
utility. The OSS man command retains the ability to call an nroff or troff formatting
tool to provide automatically formatted updates, even though the OSS shell product
does not provide such a tool. When the MANPATH variable is not defined, the man
command searches directories in the following order:
/usr/share/man/man*
/usr/local/man/man*
/usr/share/man/cat*
/usr/local/man/cat*
If the man command finds a source file in a /usr/share/man/man* directory that
has the name a user is searching for as a formatted file provided by HP in
/usr/share/man/cat*, the man command appears to fail with the error message:
Nroff/troff is not currently installed, this must be
installed in order to use formatted man pages.
HP does not currently ship unformatted source files in /usr/share/man/man*.
However, if that set of directories is used, similar man command behavior occurs.
Using the /etc/profile File Instead of a motd Command
You can also use the /etc/profile file to send a message to all users when they
log in. You can inform them of new features, projected downtime, or any other matter
that you think they should know. To do so, include a line in the /etc/profile file
such as:
echo "message"
where message is the message you want to send. You must include the quotation
marks.
If this command line is in the /etc/profile file, then each time a user logs in to the
OSS environment, the echo command is executed and the message appears on the
user’s terminal.