Bash .profile not loading

Question

I'm not sure what's happened but my ~/.profile is no longer loading.

Can anyone see something wrong with the following?

export PS1="\u@local [\w]# "
export EDITOR="subl -w"
export CLICOLOR=1
export LSCOLORS=GxFxCxDxBxegedabagaced

alias vst="ssh -i ~/.ssh/vst root@vst"

I know for a fact using that PS1 like I am attempting to do it should be doing Peter@local [~/path/to/file]# but it's not.

Any ideas?

kenorb · Accepted Answer · 2015-03-19 18:38:57Z

35

Does ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bash_login exist? If so, that'll be used instead of ~/.profile.

edited Mar 19, 2015 at 18:38

kenorb

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answered Jul 16, 2012 at 5:59

Gordon Davisson

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3 Comments

Peter Over a year ago

I did in fact have a .bash_login. Copying the contents from there to .profile and removing bash_login fixed it. Thank you.

javatarz Over a year ago

@Peter: the solution kenorb gave below (stackoverflow.com/a/29152555/499797) is a much better than copy pasting all information into the same file.

Z. Bagley Over a year ago

Stumbled on this thread when reverting from Mac OSX Catalina "upgrade" of zsh back to bash. Turns out ~/.bash_profile isn't used, and only ~/.profile is being sourced when using /bin/sh as default terminal now. Copy bash_profile to profile and your old sources will be available.

Jaakko · Accepted Answer · 2019-10-23 07:06:55Z

In Unix FAQ (for OS X) we can read:

Bash Startup Files

When a "login shell" starts up, it reads the file /etc/profile and then ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bash_login or ~/.profile (whichever one exists - it only reads ONE of these, checking for them in the order mentioned).

When a "non-login shell" starts up, it reads the file /etc/bashrc and then the file ~/.bashrc.

Note that when bash is invoked with the name sh, it tries to mimic the startup sequence of the Bourne shell (sh). In particular, a non-login shell invoked as sh does not read any dot files by default. See the bash man page for details.

So if you already have ~/.bash_profile, the file ~/.profile won't be automatically read by bash, therefore you can add the following lines in your ~/.bash_profile to load it:

# Load user profile file
if [ -f ~/.profile ]; then
  . ~/.profile
fi

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