About bash profile bashrc and where should alias be written in

Question

Possible Duplicate    What  39 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

User · Answer

Check out http   mywiki wooledge org DotFiles for an excellent resource on the topic aside from man bash   Summary    You only log in once  and that s when    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 Once you log in  you can run several more shells   Imagine logging in  running X  and in X starting a few terminals with bash shells   That means your login shell started X  which inherited your login shell s environment variables  which started your terminals  which started your non-login bash shells   Your environment variables were passed along in the whole chain  so your non-login shells don t need to load them anymore   Non-login shells only execute    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 Now  as part of UNIX peculiarity  a login-shell does NOT execute    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

User · Answer

The reason you separate the login and non-login shell is because the  bashrc file is reloaded every time you start a new copy of Bash  The  profile file is loaded only when you either log in or use the appropriate flag to tell Bash to act as a login shell   Personally    I put my PATH setup into a  profile file  because I sometimes use other shells   I put my Bash aliases and functions into my  bashrc file  I put this     bin bash     CRM  bash profile Time-stamp   2008-12-07 19 42      echo  Loading   HOME   bash profile  source    profile   get my PATH setup source    bashrc    get my Bash aliases   in my  bash profile file    Oh  and the reason you need to type bash again to get the new alias is that Bash loads your  bashrc file when it starts but it doesn t reload it unless you tell it to  You can reload the  bashrc file  and not need a second shell  by typing  source    bashrc   which loads the  bashrc file as if you had typed the commands directly to Bash

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

[bash] About .bash_profile, .bashrc, and where should alias be written in?

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