Clarity, please: .bashrc and other bash startup scripts

[rpaskudniak]

Greetings again.

This is not really a major problem, just a quibble over something I have observed and wish to share my $0.02 (US) with y'all.

I see that there is a .bashrc in my home directory and I have established it is being executed. This is fine though I was initially confused by the man page for bash:

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, and reads and executes commands from the first one that exists and is readable.
Note: No mention of .bashrc. The emphasis (underline) is my editorializing.

I would chalk this up to a bug in the documentation. My assumption is that .bashrc should be listed first in the above list. As I write this I am downloading a bunch of updates, including documentation on bash. Until that download completes I will not know if this has been fixed. I'll post an update if something changes.

Your opinions?

[gmargo]

Presumably you do not have a ~/.bash_profile or a ~/.bash_login file; most people don't.

However, you most likely have a ~/.profile file. The default ~/.profile contains a clause that executes the ~/.bashrc file. That's how it is running upon login. It's not a doc bug.

[nothingspecial]

There are a few references to .bashrc in man bash.

To search man pages...

press /

then enter a search string (eg .bashrc)

Press n to go to the next one, or N (Shift + N) to go to the previous.

note: this is a feature of less that opens man pages by default.