Possible Duplicate: What's the difference between .bashrc, .bash_profile, and .environment?
It seems that if I use
alias ls='ls -F'
inside of .bashrc on Mac OS X, then the newly created shell will not have that alias. I need to type bash
again and that alias will be in effect.
And if I log into Linux on the hosting company, the .bashrc
file has a comment line that says:
For non-login shell
and the .bash_profile
file has a comment that says
for login shell
So where should aliases be written in? How come we separate the login shell and non-login shell?
Some webpage say use .bash_aliases
, but it doesn't work on Mac OS X, it seems.
This question is related to
bash
shell
environment
From the bash manpage:
When bash is invoked as an interactive login shell, or as a non-interactive shell with the
--login
option, it first reads and executes commands from the file/etc/profile
, if that file exists. After reading that file, it looks for~/.bash_profile
,~/.bash_login
, and~/.profile
, in that order, and reads and executes commands from the first one that exists and is readable. The--noprofile
option may be used when the shell is started to inhibit this behavior.When a login shell exits, bash reads and executes commands from the file
~/.bash_logout
, if it exists.When an interactive shell that is not a login shell is started, bash reads and executes commands from
~/.bashrc
, if that file exists. This may be inhibited by using the--norc
option. The--rcfile
file option will force bash to read and execute commands from file instead of~/.bashrc
.
Thus, if you want to get the same behavior for both login shells and interactive non-login shells, you should put all of your commands in either .bashrc
or .bash_profile
, and then have the other file source the first one.
Check out http://mywiki.wooledge.org/DotFiles for an excellent resource on the topic aside from man bash
.
Summary:
~/.bash_profile
or ~/.profile
is read and executed. Since everything you run from your login shell inherits the login shell's environment, you should put all your environment variables in there. Like LESS
, PATH
, MANPATH
, LC_*
, ... For an example, see: My .profile
~/.bashrc
, not /.profile
or ~/.bash_profile
, for this exact reason, so in there define everything that only applies to bash. That's functions, aliases, bash-only variables like HISTSIZE (this is not an environment variable, don't export it!), shell options with set
and shopt
, etc. For an example, see: My .bashrc
~/.bashrc
but only ~/.profile
or ~/.bash_profile
, so you should source that one manually from the latter. You'll see me do that in my ~/.profile
too: source ~/.bashrc
..bash_profile
is loaded for a "login shell". I am not sure what that would be on OS X, but on Linux that is either X11 or a virtual terminal.
.bashrc
is loaded every time you run Bash. That is where you should put stuff you want loaded whenever you open a new Terminal.app window.
I personally put everything in .bashrc
so that I don't have to restart the application for changes to take effect.
Source: Stackoverflow.com