[gentoo-dev] Re: [gentoo-soc] Re: Progress on Universal Select Tool

[Robert Buchholz]

On Thursday 23 July 2009, Sérgio Almeida wrote:
> You changedir, you call uprofile, and
> voila, new profile. You login again, default profile.

Most shells have the ability to execute a command when a new prompt is 
generated. Users do not need to call uprofile themselves, they could 
set up their ~/.*shrc to do this.

For zsh (and tcsh), you can define a function:
       chpwd  Executed whenever the current working directory is
              changed.
       precmd Executed before each prompt.  Note that precommand 
              functions are not re-executed simply because the
              command line is redrawn, as happens, for example, when
              a notification about an exiting job is displayed.

For bash, you can set a variable:
       PROMPT_COMMAND If set, the value is executed as a
                      command prior to issuing each primary prompt.


You could utilize this to call uprofile, have it output environment 
variables and set them in the shell environment. A portable (bug ugly, 
code wise) way would be to do this as part of the PS1 variable.



Robert