From: Douglas Henke (henke@scaly.ssc.gov)
Date: 09/30/93


From: henke@scaly.ssc.gov (Douglas Henke)
Subject: Re: WHAT HAVE I TO DO TO SET UP THE .PROFILE
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 1993 21:36:37 GMT


[Various people ask about how to get their shell to work right, and in
particular what the bash equivalent of csh's .cshrc and .login files are.]

The file /etc/profile is sourced by bash. Put things in here that everyone
will want to do (like setting a default path, etc.). Bash then looks in
your home directory for a file called .bash_profile and sources that on
login.

To find out how to write bash scripts, see the manual page for bash.

For example, to set an environment variable, you would write:

MYVAR=some_value
export MYVAR

Note that although /bin/sh is actually bash, bash looks at the name used to
invoke it and behaves differently depending on that name.

                                        -DGH