LD_LIBRARY_PATH

[Miner, Jonathan W (CSC) (US SSA)]

-----Original Message-----
From:	redhat-list-bounces at redhat.com on behalf of Nigel Wade
Sent:	Thu 10/26/2006 04:44 AM
To:	General Red Hat Linux discussion list
Cc:	
Subject:	Re: LD_LIBRARY_PATH

Miner, Jonathan W (CSC) (US SSA) wrote:
> Hi -
>  
> I'm trying to investigate a problem that my users are having when trying to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH in their .login files. On RHEL4u4 systems, after they login via gdm and launch a Gnome Terminal, the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable is no longer set.  Other variables set in their .login files are properly set. Remote logins via telnet, rlogin, or ssh are not effected by this problem. I've looked into other releases, and see the same behavior in FC4 and FC5, but not in RHL9. According to the users, this problem first started earlier this year, purhaps in March 2006.
>  
> There are workarounds:
>  
> 1) Configure gnome-terminal to run as a "login shell"
>  
> 2) Move LD_LIBRARY_PATH definitions into users' .cshrc files
>  
> 3) Add configuration information to the /etc/ld.so.conf.d/ directory.
>  
> I'm still trying to figure out what changed to cause this to happen.
> 

xdm/gdm use sh/bash whilst they are setting up the session. So, /etc/profile is 
the place to locate system wide environment settings, and $HOME/.bash_profile 
for individual settings.

It may seem strange, but the users shell setting doesn't come into it until the 
user actually runs gnome-terminal, or whatever X shell they prefer.
-------------------------------------------------

This is not true.  The user's specified shell is envoked by the /etc/X11/xinit/Xsession script.  I did discover why LD_LIBRARY_PATH is being dropped from the environment.  The problem is that ssh-agent is sgid, and according to the ld.so man page, LD_LIBRARY_PATH is ignored by suid/sgid programs; not only is it ignored, it is also not passed along to child processes either.