One possible reaction to how we don't really control user desktops is to shrug and let users go their own way ifthey don't want to have one of the short list of provided desktopenvironments. You won't fight it, but you won't do anything to supportit either; you'll let them run Ubuntu, or OS X, or whatever, but they'reentirely on their own.

This is a great way to make a terrible mistake. You really do want '

In light of the complexity that is requiredto use the same set of shell dotfiles on all of the systems where Ihave accounts, one might sensibly ask why I bother. The answer is thatI heavily customize my account's environment; I have all sorts ofaliases , environment variable settings, and so on.

(Such heavy customization does have its downsides , including that I am not really comfortableon a new system until I have brought up my environment. A more subtledisadvantage for a sysadmin is that it

This is the sort of trick where I present the code first and explainit afterwards:

arch=`(PATH=$HOME/bin:/local/bin:$PATH arch || echo unknown) 2>/dev/null`

(This has been slightly modified to keep the line length down; in thereal version, more things are added to $PATH . Note that this may beword-wrapped in your browser.)

This sets the $arch variable to the output of the arch command