Re: etcupdate -B, /.cshrc and /.profile

On 22 Aug 2023, at 21:37, Jamie Landeg-Jones wrote:

> Graham Perrin <grahamperrin@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> If I recall correctly, a few hours ago etcupdate -B resulted in removal
>> of two files:
>>
>> /.cshrc
>> /.profile
>>
>> Is this degree of checking/removal a novelty?
>>
>> (I can't recall the files' contents, or when I created them. I guess
>> that I carelessly created them as dot files months ago without realising
>> that I wasn't at ~, I don't mourn their loss.)
>
> For as long as I can remember, (as far back as FreeBSD 2.2.7 in 1998) all
> FreeBSD installs have /.cshrc and /profile as hardlinks to /root/.cshrc and
> /root/.profile .

Both sets have been present since 4.3-Reno in 1990, although they were
apparently not links.

> Removing them both is one of the first things I do when I install a new
> system from install-media.

Why?

> If etcupdate is now removing them, maybe there has been an update to the src
> distribution / mntree so that this historical weirdness has finally been removed?

It is not weird.  /.profile and /.cshrc are used in single-user mode, the ones
in /root are used for root logins.

> If you have a /root/.cshrc and /root/.profile, try doing an ls -c on them to
> see if their changed-date is when you did the etcupdate.

They were modified by the removal of $FreeBSD$ a few days ago at the next
etcupdate.

		Mike