Bash doesn't read .bashrc unless manually started

Question

bash won't source .bashrc from an interactive terminal unless I manually run bash from a terminal:

$ bash

or manually source it:

$ source ./.bashrc

or running:

$ st -e bash

Here's some useful output I hope:

$ echo $TERM
st-256color

$ echo $SHELL
/bin/sh

$ readlink /bin/sh
bash

$ shopt login_shell
login_shell     off

I'm on CRUX Linux 3.0 and I use dwm and st. I've tried using .bash_profile and .profile with no success.

Any ideas?

For those who wonder st is a not so well known terminal. Mentioning a better known one would have made the question clearer, but I guess one is allowed to insert some little propaganda in a question. — Johan Boulé, Jun 06 '24 at 19:46

score 58 · Answer 1 · edited Dec 27 '14 at 18:24

58

In .bash_profile make sure you have the following:

# .bash_profile

# If .bash_profile exists, bash doesn't read .profile
if [[ -f ~/.profile ]]; then
  . ~/.profile
fi

# If the shell is interactive and .bashrc exists, get the aliases and functions
if [[ $- == *i* && -f ~/.bashrc ]]; then
    . ~/.bashrc
fi

edited Dec 27 '14 at 18:24

deepthought-64

123

answered Oct 10 '13 at 18:41

Jeight

2,699

1

@terdon Your answer is the correct one. My answer would only be valid if he was running bash. Nice catch, I missed that. – Jeight Oct 10 '13 at 18:47
This might give you a few headaches if you run bash alongside another shell, such as ksh93 which uses .profile by default. – Kusalananda Jul 31 '16 at 18:05
1

If ~/.bash_profile doesn't exist, you can create it. – Pratik Singhal Jul 10 '17 at 05:46
1

.bashrc in Debain-based OS, .bash_profile in CentOS/Fedora/Mac OS – Mitoxys Jul 16 '18 at 02:26
2

@Mitoxys bashrc and bash_profile serve two different purposes irrespective of what distro/OS you are running bash in. – b-jazz Jan 22 '20 at 23:46

terdon · Accepted Answer · 2021-10-27T08:55:31.643

Why would it source it? Your default shell is not bash, but sh:

$ echo $SHELL
/bin/sh

In most modern systems, sh is a symlink to a basic shell. On my Debian for example:

$ ls -l /bin/sh 
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 Aug  1  2012 /bin/sh -> dash

In your case, sh is a link to bash but, as explained in man bash:

If bash is invoked with the name sh, it tries to mimic the startup behavior of historical versions of sh as closely as possible, while conforming to the POSIX standard as well. [...] When invoked as an interactive shell with the name sh, bash looks for the variable ENV, expands its value if it is defined, and uses the expanded value as the name of a file to read and execute. Since a shell invoked as sh does not attempt to read and execute commands from any other startup files, the --rcfile option has no effect.

and

--norc
Do not read and execute the system wide initialization file /etc/bash.bashrc and the personal initialization file ~/.bashrc if the shell is interactive. This option is on by default if the shell is invoked as sh.

So, since your default shell is sh, .bashrc is not read. Just set your default shell to bash using chsh -s /bin/bash.

Thank you. I assumed it didn't matter since /bin/sh pointed to /bin/bash. I suppose this issue stemmed from not explicitly assigning the shell to /bin/bash when I originally created the user account. — haste, Oct 10 '13 at 18:56
Also, Debian/Ubuntu switched to dash for /bin/sh as part of the effort to reduce startup time. This was hilarious when my users started asking why their shell acted differently. — kurtm, Oct 10 '13 at 20:14

Bash doesn't read .bashrc unless manually started

2 Answers2