On 4/18/00 23:48, Eddis JEfferson at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
>In my studies of the startup files, I've encountered
>the .profile and the .bashrc files. I understand that
>there is a global one of each, and then there is a
>user one of each.
>
>What I don't understand is the purpose of the .bashrc
>file. My documentation says it's for alias' and for
>"functions". What is a function?? I suspect this is
>getting into shell scripting...
>
O'Reilly's "Learning the bash Shell" by Cameron Newham and Bill
Rosenblatt, says that bash uses three files, .bash_profile, .bashrc and
.bash_logout.
.bash_profile (which can also be named .bash_login) is executed when you
log in. When you log in, bash will first look for .bash_profile. If it
doesn't find it, it will then look for .bash_login and then .profile.
You can place commands you want to run when you login in this file. For
example, if you wanted a calendar printed to the screen, or fortune run,
or your schedule for the day displayed when you first logged in, these
commands would go in .bash_profile. Note that the Bourne shell also
reads its information from .profile. According to the book, "a similar
approach was intended for .bash_login and the C shell .login, but due to
differences in the basic syntax of the shells, this is not a good idea."
.bashrc is executed every time you start up a new subshell. If you want
the same commands to run in your interactive shells as run in your login
shell, you can use the source command within .bash_profile to run your
.bashrc file.
.bash_logout is read a login shell exits. An example usage is to have
the screen clear as you log out, so that whoever sits down afterward at
that terminal doesn't see a screen full of your latest novel, or whatever.
>It also said that some distro's forego the .bashrc and
>put everything in the respective .profile file. So I
>commented out my alias' (just one for color ls) and
>moved them to the ~/.profile file. Worked fine...
On my SuSE 6.3 system, the default .bashrc says at the top, "~/.bashrc is
read for interactive shells and ~/.profile is read for login shells. We
just let ~/.profile also read ~/.bashrc and put everything in ~/.bashrc."
>
>What then is the logic behind having a .bashrc file?
>And what are rc files (run control if I'm correct)
>used for---there are rc files for x and kde and other
>apps to. Are they running configuration files?
>
Yes.
>And maybe it's a Caldera thing---but why is roots home
>directory outside the /home tree? Is this normal?
>
On my SuSE system, root's home directory is /root. I believe (although
it has been a while) that on my old NetBSD system, root's home directory
was literally the root directory, /, but I am probably wrong.
Cheers,
Sean
T. Sean (Theo) Schulze
[EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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