@Kusalananda one trick to holding a kid longer is to use your hips to support them, versus 100% arm (cc @Jesse_b). The other trick is to help them be happy on the floor :)

@Jesse_b It sounds like you enjoy the idea, at least, of chainsaw stuff.

@Kusalananda wow, 4 hrs a day, you must like the baby a lot or the baby like you a lot.

I often smile when seeing a b-a-b-y.

@Tim I think it was mutual. And besides, I only get to see this kid like twice a year or so.

On a heavy note, affection for baby and young people is very common, but I don't like ageism and feel sad that people often apply ageism to others, for example, when judging if one has potential.

Sigh. More TeX-related hairpulling.

Hello

@AndrasDeak Hey.

What brings you to this neck of the woods?

I was going to ask about an admittedly XY problem concerning SSH, but then I saw the room description and wondered if it's a hint that I should not ask technical questions here. Then I got distracted by work :D

@AndrasDeak People ask technical questions here all the time. If the question is poorly defined, or you're unclear what is actually going on, it's fine to ask for clarifications here. Well-posed questions should go on the site, though. Though Sundays aren't really peak time here.

This room isn't exactly a hotbed of activity most of the time. Similar to most SE rooms, really.

On the plus side, you can generally rely on people being polite, helpful and constructive.

It's more like I know what the right answer to my problem is, but I can't use that :) If I saw my question on main I'd probably downvote it as not useful for future readers. In case you're not strictly against asking for help here then I think I'll write it up later and ask away. Thanks :)

@AndrasDeak I'm not in charge of the room. Feel free to think out loud here, if you want. But there is no guarantee anyone will have an answer for you, of course.

As always, of course :) But thank you, noted.

Obviously, a lot more people will see a question on the site.

my Stack Overflow-based judgement is very critical of general question usefulness :D

But I often ask questions on SE chat rooms, because (a) I think they are too trivial for the site (b) have been asked already (c) I'm not exactly sure what I need to ask.

It's worth noting that the U&L site is a whole lot friendlier than SO, last I checked.

hehe, good to know ;)

Actually, SO seems to get less friendly all the time, though it may have levelled off.

For example, on TeX SE, maybe 1/10 questions I have actually end up the site. Maybe less.

@FaheemMitha Yeah, that's what I'd do myself. I just got uncertain due to the room topic. Some of the rooms I frequent on chat.SO have some formal rules so I'm conscious about trying to behave idiomatically

@AndrasDeak This room is fairly relaxed.

@AndrasDeak If you explain your situation (e.g. why you can't use the "right" answer), people might come up with alternatives -- or say "well, nothing else will work correctly". Showing your research/effort tends to prevent most downvotes here.

Thanks, I guess that's also true for Stack Overflow

So my XY problem is that I want to automatically source a file when I log in to a machine using ssh. The "X" would be "use .bashrc", which I can't, because I'm sharing an account on the machine with some coworkers, and I don't want to affect their sessions. I'm also acutely aware of how horrible this is, but there's nothing I can do about it. What I decided to do is have my own bashrc-like file that I source manually when I log in, and I'm wondering if I can automate this somehow.

All my searches have unsurprisingly ended up at .bashrc and other related files :)

I did think of passing a command to ssh that ends with /bin/bash -i or something similar, but I can't help but feel that this would be very hacky

Now that I tried I'm not even sure how to do that, because child shells don't inherit aliases, which is what I need

Just to be more exact: I'm trying ssh -t host 'source ~/adeak/notbashrc; export my_alias; /bin/bash -i' and variations thereof

where I have something like my_alias='echo foobar' in ~/adeak/notbashrc for the sake of completeness

@AndrasDeak You could run a forced command from remote, as part of your ssh login.

Assuming you log in from a restricted set of machines.

You said you using the same account as other users? That's really not ideal, for all sorts of reasons.

What happens if there are two of you doing something to the same file, or files?

Yes. :D

@FaheemMitha I thought that forced commands only work if I have access to the server configuration (which I don't, I'm just an end user on an hpc cluster, sorry for not mentioning sooner)

@AndrasDeak All you are doing is running some commands on the remote machine after logging in. If I remember correctly, you can even manage without a shell. Though I could be remembering wrong.

We're scientists being guests at the cluster of fellow scientists. I was given access to the cluster using the account of a colleague, and I'm the only one who thought there was an issue with this :)

@FaheemMitha I see, thanks, I'll look into that!

@AndrasDeak So there are two of you using the same account?

two to three...

usually two these days :D

It basically costs nothing to create an account, so I can't imagine why the sysadmin would not automatically do that.

Very odd.

The admin would probably do that, and I'll ask them for exactly that when I go out to meet them in person soon :) The issue never reached the admin, it was a pragmatic solution made on a high level :D

When I said "you can even manage without a shell", to be clear, my vague recollection is that you can run commands before starting a shell. Though, again, I could be wrong. And it's not relevant to your user case, anyway.

As I said I'm fully aware how bad this is, which is why I didn't want to ask on main. The restriction of not wanting to use .bashrc is quite ridiculous.

@AndrasDeak Well, it wasn't your doing. People often work under restrictions of one sort or the other. Though more commonly it's not having root.

I'll try looking into the forced command, that should be enough for me to look into, thanks again. If all else fails I can manage fine with having to source the file myself. Or even better, finally get around to learning screen or tmux :)

Hehe, OK, for posterity I managed to hack it up via ssh -t host '/bin/bash --init-file <(echo source ~/adeak/notbashrc) -i' :D Fortunately the real .bashrc is practically empty.

(I'll probably end up using screen or tmux)

@AndrasDeak Screen and tmux are always handy for persistent sessions.

There's also that "better" ssh whose name I can never remember.

Mosh, i think.

every now and then I get bitten by something that makes me want to learn the likes of screen and tmux, but then I always forget and keep putting it off :)

Never heard of mosh, I'll look it up

from my very layman standpoint it looks interesting :)

@AndrasDeak Screen is trivial to use. Just type screen. Then proceed as usual.

When logging out, just detach the screen session first. Ctrl-A Ctrl-D, or something like that.

(But I could be wrong.)

From my experience tmux starts the same :D But then I want to detach and reattach...I'm not saying it's very hard, I just never got around to actually use it :) Thanks for the tips!

And of course, after logging in you need to reattach. You just need to do screen -r.

If there is only one screen session.

there will only ever be one, unless I forget...

@Andras just brainstorming, but if you all connect from different IP addresses, and you're willing to modify .bashrc with a case statement, you could combine those two ideas to run a source command if/when that account logs in from a particular IP address (or set of addresses)

Thanks, I'm afraid that would be overkill :) And I'm trying to be as non-invasive as possible (though mostly for my sake)

I decided to start using screen which should remove the whole "environment setup" issue. But at least I learned how to use a vimrc in a weird location...