login message in jail terminal to explain what it's for

[bcrowell]

I've installed PC-BSD, and so far am very impressed. The GUI installer is very nice.

I had some problems at first because I was trying to do things in a terminal window I popped up by double-clicking on Konsole desktop icon, not understanding that it was actually putting me in a jail. Man pages didn't work, ssh didn't work, and I didn't understand why. It's true that the icon is labeled "jail," but in my case it wasn't a prominent enough smack in the face to make me realize that I shouldn't be using it for general-purpose shell sessions. It also wasn't obvious to me how to get a normal terminal window. (I didn't know that the KDE terminal app was called konsole.) I think it would be helpful if the jail terminal launcher could be set up so that when you double-clicked on it, it would start your shell session with a banner explaining that it's a jail, what it's useful for (I still don't know), and how to get a normal terminal window if that's what you want.

[rhyous]

I agree.

I would like to add the prompt should be this:

PortsJail# some command
PortsJail#

My problem is that when I leave and come back, and I have a few windows open, which one is the jail and which one isn't.

[jnixon]

I thought we may be able to do something like this by modifying .cshrc in the Ports Console, but I think it uses the .cshrc in the user's home directory.

[foxofinfinety]

if I'm not mistaken the portjail is basically working in it's own environment isn't it?
if so it would use it's own .cshrc and .login files
which would be inside the jail itself.

if so, simply modify .cshrc and .login like this:

.cshrc:

alias sp      set prompt='\[!\]PortJail\[$cwd\]:\ ' # set sp to set the prompt
alias cd      'chdir \!* ; sp'                  # redefine cd command
alias pd      'pushd \!* ; sp'                  # redefine pd command
alias pp      'popd \!* ; sp'                   # redefine pp command
sp                                                 # set the prompt

it would work mostly the same as the normal prompt, which a minor differance, normally the host-name is displayed, here the host name is replaced with "PortJail".

.login:

echo "Notice: you are using the PortJail!"
echo "The PortJail is only made to manage FreeBSD Ports and works only on a jail"
echo "Commands you use here will not affect the main system."
echo "Some commands will not be available."

and you have both portjail in the promt and a login message

[kmoore134]

Yes and no, the portjail is it's own seperate environment, but it shares
"/usr/home" with your regular profile. If you run "mount" you'll see.

This lets your apps work on your data without having to do a lot of
copying around.

I would imagine there is a way to do it, probably need some if statement
to check if this is the portjail, and then
set the prompt different