Where to put shell commands to run at login?

[ssbarnea]

I want to add some aliases to pfsense shell in a way that I would not lose them on system upgrade and if possible to keep them between system restores.

How can I do this?

As far as I seen the files like .profile state that they are part of pfsense, none of them mentioning that user is welcomed to add his changes to them.

I only want to add alias mc="mc -u" in order to avoid failure to start due to common.c: unimplemented subshell type 1

[NogBadTheBad]

Install the Shellcmd package.

[ssbarnea]

@nogbadthebad said in Where to put shell commands to run at login?:

Shellcmd

Thanks, this looks like the proper way to add extra commands.

The irony is that something is preventing the alias command from having any effect. I tried "alias dir=ls" but it does nothing. Running "alias" reports no aliases at all.

[stephenw10]

You have to use the complete path to the command in shellcmd. Also the tcsh shell doesn't require an = so you probably want:
/usr/bin/alias dir ls

Steve

[revengineer]

I added "alias ll ls -la" to /etc/csh.cshrc. I previously put the alias in ~/csh.cshrc only to find that this files get overwritten frequently.

[Derelict]

It's a firewall not a Unix workstation.

[ssbarnea]

@stephenw10 After more searching on StackOverflow I was able to narrow down why it was not working, I must use single quotes, this version being alias mc 'mc -u' being the correct one.

On the other hand I made a grim discovery regarding shellcmd extension, it seems to run the command at boot time and not at login time, which is what is needed for aliases. I am not willing to ruin the uptime of the router by rebooting it for that, even if is my home-office one.

The interesting thing is that there are few already defined aliases inside /root/.cshrc file but they are not loaded. $SHELL reports /bin/sh but $0 reports /bin/tcsh which explains why the only way to make it work was to add that line to the end of /root/.tcshrc file, with ansible and hopefully to run ansible again after each upgrade. Maybe someone will find a more persistent solution.

I will try to avoid starting a flame war regarding non-constructive comments that can only alienate users and convince them to move to alternatives ;)

[revengineer]

@ssbarnea: Not sure you have seen my post. Have you tried /etc/csh.cshrc?

Derelict has a point in that some people try to do too much on the firewall and thereby risk making the firewall vulnerable to attacks. However, I have found myself several times in a situation with a corrupted database from a package (probably from power outages) that did require fixing via shell. Having basic aliases defined for such maintenance is helpful.

[Gertjan]

@revengineer said in Where to put shell commands to run at login?:

I added "alias ll ls -la" to /etc/csh.cshrc. I previously put the alias in ~/csh.cshrc only to find that this files get overwritten frequently.

Although I agree with @Derelict **, 'll' is the alias I use very often - on any system.

[Grimson]

@ssbarnea said in Where to put shell commands to run at login?:

I am not willing to ruin the uptime of the router by rebooting it for that, even if is my home-office one.

There is nothing to be proud about a high uptime. A high uptime only showcases that you're late with updates.