(So that job control works.)
While ago I tried to make a ".desktop" file to start Bash shell and list directory contents and not exit.
This was the command which I ended up with:
urxvtc -e bash -i -c "cd %f; ls; exec bash"
It starts terminal (in this case urxvtc) which in turn runs Bash commands "cd <some path>", "ls" and "exec bash". The "exec bash" command is needed to stop the parent Bash from exiting immediately after "ls" command has finished.
This is basically the answer to the following question: bash-execute-command-given-in-commandline-and-dont-exit. The problem with this is that if one wants to start e.g. vim like this:
urxvtc -e bash -i -c "vim; exec bash"
It superficially works, vim is started and after quitting vim a Bash shell is presented. But inside vim the job control doesn't work as expected. One cannot suspend vim and do something inside Bash and then return to the vim instance by foregrounding it. This is because "exec bash" is ran only after vim has exited.
So how to solve this problem?
First idea as presented in the superuser question was to modify ".bashrc" to start the vim. Here it's done dynamically by creating new ".bashrc" file on-the-fly from an existing one:
bash --rcfile <(cat ${HOME}/.bashrc; echo 'vim') -i
The problem with this is that the job control is initialized only after ".bashrc" has been processed, so it still doesn't work with vim.
To overcome this problem with vim or any other program, the program should start only after the job control has been initialized. So how to do this with Bash?
I couldn't find a proper solution, only a very hackish one:
bash --rcfile <(cat ${HOME}/.bashrc; echo 'export PROMPT_COMMAND="vim;
export PROMPT_COMMAND="') -i
The idea is to abuse "PROMPT_COMMAND"[^1] to delay the vim start so that job control already works. There are probably other similar solutions, but I would be very happy to hear about a "clean" way to do this. I have contemplated of adding this functionality to my xdg-open clone but it just seems too hackish, even for me ;)
If you have any questions, error corrections or just further remarks about this subject, I'm very happy to receive email about this.
[^1]: If set, the value is interpreted as a command to execute before the printing of each primary prompt ($PS1), see bash manual.
