Should the .bashrc in the home directory load automatically?

Question

I added scala in my .bashrc file, but when I shut off my mac and turn it back on it does not find it. When i do

source ~/.bashrc

all is back to normal. I would say the issue is with the whole file in general, but the problem, is I have other things in there that have worked just fine before, but the problem is persistent with scala. Anybody know why this is and explain why I am getting the problem? This is whats in my .bashrc file, which runs rvm and mysql correctly, but not scala:

PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.rvm/bin # Add RVM to PATH for scripting
export PATH="/usr/local/mysql/bin:$PATH"
export PATH="/Users/Zeroe/scala-2.9.1-1/bin:$PATH"

See [here](http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/12993/why-doesnt-bashrc-run-automatically). — ughoavgfhw, Mar 31 '12 at 04:34
Hmm, thanks a lot for the link. I will try it when I get a chance. Definitely put it as an answer so I can accept it if it works. — Andy, Mar 31 '12 at 04:39

kev · Answer 1 · 2012-03-31T08:21:49.417

I figured out this diagram by adding echo "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" to those scripts.

                     +-----------------+   +------FIRST-------+   +-----------------+
                     |                 |   | ~/.bash_profile  |   |                 |
login shell -------->|  /etc/profile   |-->| ~/.bash_login ------>|  ~/.bashrc      |
                     |                 |   | ~/.profile       |   |                 |
                     +-----------------+   +------------------+   +-----------------+
                     +-----------------+   +-----------------+
                     |                 |   |                 |
interactive shell -->|  ~/.bashrc -------->| /etc/bashrc     |
                     |                 |   |                 |
                     +-----------------+   +-----------------+
                     +-----------------+
                     |                 |
logout shell ------->|  ~/.bash_logout |
                     |                 |
                     +-----------------+

Note

[]-->[] means source by workflow (Automatically).
[--->[] means source by convention （Manually. If not, nothing happen.）.
FIRST means find the first available, ignore rest

Nice picture - much better than the wall of text docs usually seen on this stuff. — Michael Burr, Apr 07 '12 at 06:47
A few notes: "interactive shell" should be "interactive, non-login shell", and "login shell" should be "interactive, login shell". Also, at least on Ubuntu, for non-login, interactive shells, `/etc/bash.bashrc` is read first, then `~/.bashrc`. Note that `/etc/bash.bashrc` is not in vanilla GNU Bash, it's a modification that a lot of distros do. — philb, Dec 08 '20 at 16:30

score 11 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 31 '12 at 04:43

Your shell is probably a login shell, in which case bash will read various profile files in order:

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

It's typical to source ~/.bashrc from one of those files so you get the same config for login shells as well.

This is what my ~/.profile contains:

# ~/.profile: executed by the command interpreter for login shells.
# This file is not read by bash(1), if ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bash_login
# exists.
# see /usr/share/doc/bash/examples/startup-files for examples.
# the files are located in the bash-doc package.

# the default umask is set in /etc/profile; for setting the umask
# for ssh logins, install and configure the libpam-umask package.
#umask 022

# if running bash
if [ -n "$BASH_VERSION" ]; then
    # include .bashrc if it exists
    if [ -f "$HOME/.bashrc" ]; then
    . "$HOME/.bashrc"
    fi
fi

# set PATH so it includes user's private bin if it exists
if [ -d "$HOME/bin" ] ; then
    PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"
fi
export LANGUAGE="en_US:en"
export LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"

Should the .bashrc in the home directory load automatically?

2 Answers2

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