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Newly installed hirsute = 21.04. Installed out of the package, created my own personal account, the default .bashrc is present in my homedir and to make sure there is a .bash_aliases too. Both mention alias ll='ls -alF' still this alias is not available after logon. Is this a bug or am I missing something?

NAME="Ubuntu"
VERSION="21.04 (Hirsute Hippo)"

karel@schal:~$ pwd ; ls -al .bash*
/home/karel
-rwxr-xr-x 1 karel users   53 Sep 26 06:22 .bash_aliases
-rw------- 1 karel users 9834 Sep 26 06:23 .bash_history
-rw-r--r-- 1 karel users 3771 Aug 31 23:17 .bashrc
karel@schal:~$ cat .bash_aliases
alias ll='ls -alF'
alias la='ls -A'
alias l='ls -CF'
karel@schal:~$ ll
ll: command not found

edited after a not-very-friendly comment, to add:

karel@wiske:~$ ssh karel@192.168.0.210
karel@192.168.0.210's password: 
Welcome to Ubuntu 21.04 (GNU/Linux 5.11.0-34-generic x86_64)

    

  • Documentation:  https://help.ubuntu.com
    • 

  • Management:     https://landscape.canonical.com
    • 

  • Support:        https://ubuntu.com/advantage
    • 



0 updates can be applied immediately.


The list of available updates is more than a week old.
To check for new updates run: sudo apt update
Last login: Sun Sep 26 09:37:21 2021
karel@schal:~$ alias
karel@schal:~$ /bin/bash
karel@schal:~$ alias
alias alert='notify-send --urgency=low -i "$([ $? = 0 ] && echo terminal || echo error)" "$(history|tail -n1|sed -e '''s/^\s[0-9]+\s//;s/[;&|]\s*alert$//''')"'
alias egrep='egrep --color=auto'
alias fgrep='fgrep --color=auto'
alias grep='grep --color=auto'
alias l='ls -CF'
alias la='ls -A'
alias ll='ls -alF'
alias ls='ls --color=auto'

and that behaviour is identical, whether logging in per ssh or in the local graphical environment or on a local text-only console (dev/tty5 and similar)

Also, as requested, excerpt from ~/.bashrc:

# Alias definitions.
# You may want to put all your additions into a separate file like
# ~/.bash_aliases, instead of adding them here directly.
# See /usr/share/doc/bash-doc/examples in the bash-doc package.

if [ -f ~/.bash_aliases ]; then
    . ~/.bash_aliases
fi

[further edited as requested]

karel@schal:~$ ls -al ~/.bash_profile  ~/.bash_login ./.profile
ls: cannot access '/home/karel/.bash_profile': No such file or directory
ls: cannot access '/home/karel/.bash_login': No such file or directory
ls: cannot access './.profile': No such file or directory
karel@schal:~$ ps -p $$ | tail -n1 | awk '{print $NF}'
bash
Karel Adams
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  • You need to include/source it from your .bashrc. Run alias to list all your available aliases – Pablo Bianchi Sep 26 '21 at 06:39
  • Thank you, Pablo. But that had been checked, and is only normal for the "vanilla" default installation. As for the "alias" command, it returns zero output. – Karel Adams Sep 26 '21 at 07:31
  • Does it work [temporarily] to add an alias directly on the command line, for example alias rm='rm -i' ? Does it work [persistently] to add an alias into ~/.bashrc, the next time you open a terminal window or text screen with bash? – sudodus Sep 26 '21 at 08:05
  • Adding an alias from the command line works, yes. But whatever I tweak to .bashrc or .bash_aliases has zero effect. I am beginning to doubt whether .bashrc gets executed at all. Checked /var/log/syslog but found nothing relevant. – Karel Adams Sep 26 '21 at 08:11
  • It seems you are you running some other shell program? What happens, if you start bash explicitly with the command line bash ? – sudodus Sep 26 '21 at 08:13
  • Did you tweak any of the commands or configuration files, that might stop executing ~/.bashrc ? Or is it possible that someone else tweaked the system to make that happen? – sudodus Sep 26 '21 at 08:15
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    Please [edit] your questions and i) tell us what happens if you add an alias definition to your ~/.bashrc and not the non-standard ~/.bash_aliases. Does that work? ii) show us the output of echo $SHELL and ps aux -p $$ so we can see what shell you are running. iii) Clarify how you log in. Is this a local system or a remote one? Do you log in via the GUI or perhaps by ssh? Finally, don't tell us "it has been checked". Show us the actual line from your ~/.bashrc that reads the ~/.bash_aliases file since that is not a bash feature, and is an Ubuntu modification. – terdon Sep 26 '21 at 08:30
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    Something will be wrong earlier in your .bashrc. Check by moving it out (renaming it) then copying in the system default .bashrc (which indeed is set up to source .bash_aliases): cp /etc/skel/.bashrc . – vanadium Sep 26 '21 at 10:32
  • It is also possible that you are not running bash but some other shell by default, for example csh, tcsh, zsh. Please check according to the commands in terdon's comment. – sudodus Sep 26 '21 at 10:51
  • @vanadium: I looked into that, but to no avail. diff .\.bashrc /etc/skel/.bashrc yielded zero output. – Karel Adams Sep 26 '21 at 13:02
  • I assume you mean my comment when you say "a not-very-friendly comment". If so, sorry! I didn't mean to come across as brusque. If that's how it came across, I must have expressed myself badly. My apologies. For what it's worth, I had also upvoted your question since yesterday. – terdon Sep 26 '21 at 13:09

2 Answers2

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When logging in over ssh, you are running what is known as an interactive login shell, and not an interactive non-login shell which is what happens when you open a terminal once logged in. Login shells do not read ~/.bashrc and instead read ~/.profile, ~/.bash_profile and ~/.bash_login. This is why your aliases are not present. For more details on this and the differences between the initialization files of various shell types, see Why are scripts in /etc/profile.d/ being ignored (system-wide bash aliases)?. This is also why you do get your aliases when you run /bin/bash since that starts a non-login shell and will read ~/.bashrc.

That said, Ubuntu's default ~/.profile file includes these lines:

# include .bashrc if it exists
if [ -f "$HOME/.bashrc" ]; then
. "$HOME/.bashrc"
fi

So it should actually be reading your ~/.bashrc as well. If this isn't happening, I suspect one of the following:

  1. You (or someone) have created a ~/.bash_profile file. That would cause the ~/.profile file to be ignored. As explained in man bash (emphasis mine):

    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 com‐ mands from the first one that exists and is readable. The --noprofile option may be used when the shell is started to inhibit this behavior.

    So if either ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bash_login exist, then anything in ~/.profile is ignored.

  2. You (or someone else) have created your own ~/.profile which does not source ~/.bashrc.

  3. You are not actually running bash. You can check this by running ps -p $$ | tail -n1 | awk '{print $NF}' in the shell where you don't have aliases. If the output isn't bash, you are running a different shell. Perhaps you've set your default login shell to sh, which is dash on Ubuntu. You can check the current value with echo $SHELL and you can change it with chsh.

Based on your latest edit, it seems that your case is:

  1. You don't have a ~/.profile for some reason. And, based on your last edit, this seems to be the case. So just copy the default .profile from /etc/skel and you should be fine next time you log in:

    cp /etc/skel/.profile ~/
Pablo Bianchi
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terdon
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@terdon had it right: for some reason or other, there was no .profile in my homedir. All was okay after - as suggested - cp /etc/skel/.profile ~

Karel Adams
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