if .bash_profile usually source .bashrc any way, why not just use .bashrc?
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05-09-2019 - |
Question
it seems that we will put
source ~/.bashrc
in our .bash_profile anyway. So why not just use one file, say .bashrc ?
Solution
Because there may be things you only want to do once per login (so in .bash_profile
) rather than every time an xterm or the like opens (as per .bashrc
), for example asking the user for a passphrase to decrypt and load SSH keys into an ssh agent, etc etc.
OTHER TIPS
You can put some things in .bash_profile
that are not appropriate for a shell instance that is not a terminal. For example, if you ran an external command from your editor through the shell - the shell instance would source .bashrc
but not .bash_profile
. For example, I might put alias ls=ls -F
in my profile, but you wouldn't want that alias applied for just any instance of the shell, just ones you would interact with.