[Tcsh] tcsh xinitrc - issues with environment variables?

[Eduardo Alvarez]

Hello, list,

I use tcsh as my login shell, and have several environment variables set up that I need for running my system.

Reading from the man page, when tcsh is used as a login shell it cannot take any scripts for arguments (so, tcsh -l some_script.tcsh won't work). This poses an issue when using tcsh with the Slim display manager (and I suspect it would be the same with any other display manager). Since I have to feed slim a script so it will run xinitrc, it cannot be set to be a login shell, so it will not parse .login. Fair enough, I figured I'd source .login manually from my xinitrc script -- and was surprised to find that none of the environment variables I use got set up. I tried putting them manually, but that didn't seem to work either.  Needless to say, I'm confused. Has anyone run into a similar problem? Any insight would be appreciated.

As an aside, I would also be interested in finding out why we can't use a script with -l.

Kind regards,

-- 
  Eduardo Alvarez
  ealvarez at fastmail.com