Hi I want only one of the user to have a separate .profile, and some login messages. This is not for everyuser. I am running Solaris 8 on Sparc. If i did setup a shellscript to get executed in the .profile automatically when the user logins in, it looks like i cannot remove access from .profile to that user. If i give no access, it does not get executed. what should i do? A shell script requires Both Read & Execute access , is it? Why not only a execute access?? i dont want anyone to read it.. Moreover, if i remove Read access from the .profile, i found, the user can easily rename the file and hence, the very purpose of the shell script called from the .profile is also failing.. Is there a solution to implement the same in another way??

If you want to limit a user's environment, you may want to set up a restricted shell. Take a look at the man page on rsh (/usr/lib/rsh). The implication is that you could create a .profile that would cd to a restricted home directory, set a path for only restricted commands, and so on. You might also be able to trap signals (interupt) in the .profile to prevent the person from doing a ctl-c. But I don't think you can do much with changing permissions.