What's the most appropriate place to put commands that should be run upon login? I want somewhere that will run no matter how I log in (X login via kdm/gdm, ssh, tty, etc). I want to do this so I can start a few background programs (like an ssh tunnel to be used as an HTTP proxy).

I'd put them in .bash_profile, but in such a way that there would be checks to ensure that the processes aren't already running, ie., .bash_profile will be sourced with each of your logins.

For example, my lappy is setup so that both my wife and I autologin and startx, so my .bash_profile has this:

which checks to ensure that x isn't already running, and that the tty that startx is called from is vc3.

You may also consider putting some commands in rc.local, for example, I have a couple of ssh tunnels that are started in rc.local, which means that they are established whether or not anyone is actually logged in.

cheers,

Thank you for the reply. I didn't know about rc.local and yea, that's probably the ideal place to run ssh tunnel... but is there a shell-agnostic version way of running a script like .bash_profile? (I'm guessing no, since the way I understand it, when you log in, the tty forks a process and exec's the shell directly, so nothing in between...) does every shell have something comparable?