[Pan-users] Re: Preserving Pan Session History Between XP/Mandriva

[Duncan]

Christopher Boorman <address@hidden>
posted address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Thu, 20 Nov 2008
20:54:10 -0500:

> Where would I find PAN_HOME? What text file would this be part of?

PAN_HOME is set as an environmental variable.  Thus, in your ~/.bashrc or 
~/.bashprofile (or both) or the like on Linux, or in a starter script if 
you prefer, that sets the variable before launching the pan binary.

If you have a user bin dir in your path, for instance, commonly ~/bin, 
you could put a script there (call it pan.sh, maybe) with the following:

#!/bin/bash
export PAN_HOME="/path/to/pan/data/dir"
/usr/bin/pan &
disown

Of course that's assuming your pan binary is located in /usr/bin/pan.  
The trailing " &" tells bash to execute the command in the background and 
continue executing the script, while disown lets go of the forked pan 
process so when the script ends, pan won't die as well.

Then change script permissions, setting it executable.

Then you could start pan with pan.sh instead of simply pan (you can 
update the pan launchers appropriately, or ~/bin/pan.sh if ~/bin/ isn't 
in your command search path, and the script will set and export PAN_HOME 
before starting pan, so pan knows where to look for its data.

There's a way to set environmental variables on MS platforms too, but 
it's been so long since I ran them that I'm not going to attempt 
describing what might have changed a bit since then in any case.

But the idea would be to put pan's data dir on either a VFAT filesystem, 
or if you have read/write NTFS mounting enabled on your Linux side, on 
NTFS, and point the Linux data dir at it (by setting PAN_HOME) so they 
both use the same dir.

Another way to do the same thing which might be less complicated if you 
don't want to bother with environmental variables, would be to point the 
default Linux location (~/.pan2) at the MS side location, using a 
symlink.  I used a symlink for years with old-pan, before the PAN_HOME 
environmental variable solution was available, to point the data dir at a 
dedicated pan partition.  It worked fine.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman