Comments on: Leopard Upgrade Report: Mo’ Features, Mo’ Problems

By: blue collar mac user

blue collar mac user — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 17:35:25 +0000

We’re also having a weird problem with Leopard aliases…to each other. My office has a mix of OS9 & Tiger Macs and we just received new iMacs. We started with just two of the new iMacs with no problem; they could communicate with each other, the older Macs and the file server with no problem. Then we added a third new iMac and now the aliases to each other don’t work. If Mac A connects to Mac B with an alias you get B, but if Mac A then tries to connect to Mac C it gets Mac B again. The same happens if you hook to Mac C first and try to get to B. This odd behavior happens on all three of the iMacs, and all our devices have manually set IP addresses.

Worse yet, Leopard’s network performance is absolutely horrible compared to Tiger & OS9. The wait for files to index is substantially longer. While file transfer time is faster, waiting for Leopard to get around to initiating the transfer (3 to 45 seconds) is absolutely ridiculous. I do not get any of this bad behavior with OS9 & Tiger. Something is definitely wrong with Leopard.

By: caric

caric — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 04:21:27 +0000

actually, the shells run inside of screen do inherit from the environment.

I did this:

export FOO=bar
screen
echo $FOO

and it printed out bar.

but the shells weren’t login shells until I tweaked the settings. and yes, $PATH did get squashed.

By: caric

caric — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 04:18:48 +0000

thanks for figuring out how to fix screen. that was driving me crazy! I could tell right away that not all my shell’s . files were being run, but I didn’t know how to fix it. I just set the shells inside screen to be login shells, that was good enough for me. it would be nice if screen would inherit the environment though.

By: Jamie Flournoy

Jamie Flournoy — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 21:05:57 +0000

It seems like Neal was close to the right answer. The version of screen that comes with Leopard apparently doesn’t inherit environment variables from the parent process (such as bash running in a Terminal.app window), but it also invokes shells in each screen as non-login shells by default (’login -pflq myusername /bin/bash’ in `ps aux`).

So, ~/.bash_profile is not executed, but ~/.bashrc is.

That means there are three ways to fix this that I can think of:

1) Tell GNU Screen that you do want it to invoke Bash as a login shell in each screen. This is not done with the -l argument to screen, though it seems like that might work. It is done by specifying the -s option, with a value of -/bin/bash (the leading – tells Bash to act as a login shell). I found this solution here:

http://forum.osnn.net/showthread.php?p=825125#8

2) Move everything that you want loaded in a shell running within GNU Screen into your .bashrc instead of .bash_profile.

3) Do as I originally did, and put a ’setenv’ command in your .screenrc file that re-establishes the settings from your ~/.bash_profile.

In my case, I’m using a custom environment-setting shell script for each project I’m working on, instead of having per-user global settings. So #1 and #2 won’t work. I may decide to give up on this approach and just stuff everything into .bashrc and lose the separation of environments between projects, for simplicity’s sake.

Anyway it’s good to know what the heck is going on.

By: Jay Caines-Gooby

Jay Caines-Gooby — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 12:51:09 +0000

I had the same problem. The quickest fix for me was to use the gnu screen from fink. This solved all my lost environment issues (make sure that /sw/bin is earlier in your PATH than /usr/bin or you’ll still be using the Leopard-supplied screen

By: Jamie Flournoy

Jamie Flournoy — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 20:43:16 +0000

>it appears that in leopard, Terminal runs screen as a login shell. that is,
>it prefixes a “-” to the command when it invokes it. run “ps” to see your running processes to see this.

Not on my system it doesn’t. I had a shell script that set a bunch of environment variables, then ran screen, which then made a bunch of screens with shells in them. Now that doesn’t work (on Leopard). So it’s not about how screen is getting invoked, as far as I can tell; screen is just resetting the value of PATH before invoking the shell in each screen. Lame.

By: Neal

Neal — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 20:44:28 +0000

a comment about screen:

it appears that in leopard, Terminal runs screen as a login shell. that is, it prefixes a “-” to the command when it invokes it. run “ps” to see your running processes to see this.

this seems to change screen’s behavior.

By: Michael Long

Michael Long — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 03:41:23 +0000

One of the biggest complaints about the old Finder was that every time you went into a new folder it would appear the default view mode (usually icon mode).

So for those of use who liked to browse using list mode, navigation was a pain in the rear as each time you changed folders the Finder would change views. You’d change it back, then open a subfolder and the process would begin anew. Hilarious.

Now, you could try to change the view mode for a certain folder, but if you didn’t have the right privileges to do so the Finder would just forget them, and the next time you returned to that folder you’d be right back where you started.

And you could try setting you own default, but again that wouldn’t work for some folders, or for others that had already been set to a different mode.

In Leopard, Apple reversed this behavior. The Finder will stay in the selected view mode when browsing, unless explicitly told otherwise. So if you always want a certain folder to display thumbnails, just hit the Icon View button, then do a command-J and check the “Always open in icon view” box.

Now the Finder will remember those settings for that folder. This way you can stay in your preferred browsing mode, but still have “special” folders that always display thumbnails or start in Cover Flow.