Bash_profile vs. .bashrc

blippe · on July 27, 2014

I would recommend reading[0] instead.

[0] http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2008/10/execution-sequence-for-b...

blippe · on July 27, 2014

And quite honestly the man page of bash is quite readable, under invocation. http://linux.die.net/man/1/bash

Canada · on July 27, 2014

In my opinion the only thing .bash_profile should do is source .bashrc, that way the environment is consistent regardless of invocation.

RexRollman · on July 27, 2014

In the example he gives, like many I have seen on the Internet, it tests for .bashrc and if it exists, sources it. But if you didn't test it and for some reason .bashrc didn't exist, what would happen? And if nothing bad would happen, why test for it?

akandiah · on July 27, 2014

It's just for cleanliness. The script would error out with something along the lines of "No such file or directory".

RexRollman · on July 27, 2014

Thanks. I've never tried it out and was curious if anyone knew.