How to set an Enviroment variable?

[Francisco Borges]

On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 2:13 PM, Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca> wrote:
>
> Francisco Borges wrote:
>  > From the bash manual:
>  > =========
>  > 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,
>  > =========
>  >
>  > So as far as I can tell, bash will only read ~/.bashrc when you start
>  > it "interactive non-login",
>
>  Possibly.  I always find the different bash scripts confusing, but I _think_
>  that's wrong.  aiui, .bashrc is executed for _every_ shell - interactive or
>  not, login or not, whereas .profile only executes for login shells (it
>  doesn't _need_ to be set for non-login shells, as they inherit from a shell
>  that already has the .profile settings).  But I could be wrong...

I am an avid shell user but actually not a bash user ;-) so it took me
a while to remember this.

Debian has for a long time set the default ~/.profile to source
~/.bashrc (if the user is running bash). So in practice, if you don't
change that, any time you run bash on a Debian system you will also
source ~/.bashrc.

The default ~/.profile for new accounts is at /etc/skel/.profile (in
the case you have, like me, deleted yours).

Kind regards,
-- 
Francisco