Invoking Bash and Start-Up Files for Your Open Source Software Needs

Read More About Bash Tip of the Trade: There are three major ways of invoking bash, all of which behave differently when reading in settings files. The one to pick depends on the scope and implementation of the settings being changed.

If you've ever tried to change system-wide bash settings, you know there are three major ways of invoking bash, all of which behave differently when reading in settings files.

1. Interactive login shell (e.g., when logging in from the console or via ssh)
2. Interactive non-login shell (e.g., when you run bash at a terminal prompt)
3. Non-interactive shell (e.g., to run a shell script)

An interactive shell has both input and output connected to a tty (usually the user's terminal). If you type echo $- and the value contains i, the shell is interactive. (The other letters are options passed in at invocation, or via the set builtin.) A login shell is started with the --loginoption. This is usually handled by whatever program you're using for login.

An interactive login shell looks for and executes files in this order:

/etc/bash_profile, ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login, ~/.profile

A non-login shell, on the other hand, reads only from

~/.bashrc

if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then
source ~/.bashrc
fi

But what about system-wide settings? A non-login shell won't read from /etc/profile, but it will inherit environment settings from the shell that invoked it, which if you go far enough back up the chain, will be a login shell. So system-wide environment settings can go in /etc/profile. Put other settings (e.g., aliases) in /etc/bashrc, then add this section to each user's ~/.bashrc:

if [ -f /etc/bashrc ]; then
source /etc/bashrc
fi

Juliet Kemp has been messing around with Linux systems, for financial reward and otherwise, for about a decade. She is also the author of "Linux System Administration Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach" (Apress, 2009).

Follow ServerWatch on Twitter