starting screen as a login shell

I realized a while ago that I wanted to invoke my shell as a login shell when starting screen. This of course gives me immediate access to things in my .profile like aliases, etc.

shell -bash

Everywhere I read said to put that in your .screenrc file. On my Mac, OS X 10.5, however it seemed to have the (extremely) unwanted circumstance of changing my cwd whenever I started screen to my $HOME folder.

I was able to do some testing my remoting into a *fairly* vanilla fedora box and running the command:

cd /; screen -s -bash

This started bash as a login shell

shopt login_shell #=> login_shell    	on

but did not change my cwd.

I tried moving my .profile file to see if it was the culprit.

I finally came up with this hackish solution.

create file

screen_shell

and place in it the line

$SHELL -l

I knew from other testing that

shell 'bash -l'

didn’t work, course, now, having remembered that I had a similar experience with vi… I wonder if

shell bash\ -l

would work… (nope…)

so, I then changed my .screenrc file to read

shell /Users/bhenderson/.screen_shell

made sure that I did a

chmod u+x ~/.screen_shell

and off I went.

If anyone would like to add to my understanding of what was going on, or a better solution, please feel free to comment. thanks.