Environment vars calling programs

Damn, I hate syntax! ;-) That's what I get for playing with Linux boxes
that have always set stuff up like that for me.. I've got a couple other
questions that might be pretty easy too.. Basically what I want to do is
create a prompt that displays the username@hostname:pathname like you get
in most Linux installs. With that last tid-bit I can set the prompt to
print everything I want until I su. The username doesn't follow the user.
I'm setting USER=`whoami` and using $USER in PS1 to get the username.
I've also used `whoami` directly in the PS1 var. No luck. Is that
because the su program on HP-UX isn't designed to update any env vars?
I'm setting all this up in the global config files so whoever I log in as
gets this setup but as soon as you su to anyone else it seems like it
looses the environment variable info. Also when telneting in I have to
use ctrl H to backspace. I've set ERASE='^H' and that doesn't seem to
help. Do I have to use the escape code? The environment is HP-UX 10.20
and I'm running a standard POSIX shell.

On Mon, 30 Oct 2000, Jeffrey Pyne wrote:

> Try using backticks instead of single quotes (i.e.
> HOSTNAME=`/bin/hostname`).
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Don Harrop [mailto:don@nis4u.com]
> Sent: Monday, October 30, 2000 10:28 AM
> To: plug-discuss@lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us
> Subject: Environment vars calling programs
>
>
> Ok, here's the first HP-UX question. I want to setup the HOSTNAME var to
> function like it does under Linux. If I set HOSTNAME='/bin/hostname' and
> echo $HOSTNAME I get '/bin/hostname' printed back, not the hostname of the
> machine.. Any ideas?
>
> Don
>
>
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