prompt and time zone

[Oliver Fromme]

Pierre Abbat <phma at phma.optus.nu> wrote:
 > Where do I put a prompt so that all users get it, regardless of
 > their shell?

You can't do that, because the various shells use different
syntax for expansion of values inside the prompt string.
Unless, of course, you only want to set the prompt to a
simple fixed string without any expansions.

But apart from that, I think it's a bad thing to enforce
a prompt on all users.  Let them chose their own.

 > I use bash; root uses sh, but I may change that.

In general it's not a good idea to change the login shell
of the root pseudo-account.  It should be left at csh.
There is no reason to change it anyway, because you should
never log in as root.

 > Where do I put the time zone so that my zone is Eastern, but the
 > logs are kept in UTC? I'd like that to work whether I log on in
 > KDE or a remote shell.

There's the tzsetup(8) tool to set the timezone.  This is
global for the whole system.  It doesn't matter how you
log in.

If you want certain processes to use UTC (e.g. syslogd),
start them with TZ=UTC in their environment.

Best regards
   Oliver

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