.bashrc not executed when opening new terminal

Question

The code in .bashrc does not execute when I open a new terminal window in Ubuntu 12.04. I noticed this when creating a .bash_aliases file. The aliases did not show up when I opened a new terminal. However when I type source .bashrc the aliases did show up.

.bashrc should be run every time I open a new terminal window, right?

How do I make this happen?

@jippie No, .profile is read at login time, not when you open a new terminal, unless there's a misconfiguration somewhere. Selah: did you change anything from the default configuration? Please run ps -o command $$ $PPID in a terminal and copy-paste the output. — Gilles 'SO- stop being evil', Jul 08 '12 at 18:50
Just to make positive sure, you are putting .bashrc in your home folder, right? — Jjed, Aug 05 '12 at 08:08
Might want to check echo $SHELL. This happened to me and the shell was /bin/sh instead of bash. Fix it in /etc/passwd and its running .bashrc. — Joe Flynn, Jan 28 '16 at 15:54
In my case deleting unused but existing $HOME/.bash_profile worked. — K. Stopa, Dec 01 '21 at 13:42
@K.Stopa The reason deleting ~/.bash_profile worked is because Bash prefers to use that instead of ~/.profile if it is found. — BadHorsie, Mar 07 '23 at 10:03

Marty Fried · Accepted Answer · 2012-07-08T22:26:48.757

248

It isn't necessarily run; at the top of the standard .bashrc is this comment:

# ~/.bashrc: executed by bash(1) for non-login shells.
# see /usr/share/doc/bash/examples/startup-files (in the package bash-doc)
# for examples

I believe there is an option to run bash terminal as a login shell or not. With Ubuntu, gnome-terminal does not normally run as a login shell, so .bashrc should be run directly.

For login shells (like the virtual terminals), normally the file ~/.profile is run, unless you have either ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bash_login, but they are not there by default. By default, Ubuntu uses only .profile.

The standard ~/.profile has this in it:

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

This runs .bashrc if it is available - assuming $BASH_VERSION is present in your environment. You can check for this by entering the command echo $BASH_VERSION, and it should display some information on version number - it should not be blank.

edited Jul 08 '12 at 22:26

answered Jul 08 '12 at 19:07

Marty Fried

18,466

4

After understanding these instructions, I went in my terminal application I went to edit -> profile preferences -> Title and Command -> Run command as a login shell. I unchecked this. Thanks for the help. – Selah Oct 08 '12 at 16:36
Can you clarify when .profile (hence .bashrc) is loaded/read? It seems this is done when the users logs in to their desktop session. The answer suggests this occurs when you start a new terminal/shell session "For login shells (like the virtual terminals), normally the file ~/.profile is run... " – hedgehog Jan 07 '13 at 04:48
5

It is normally run when you start a new login shell (not really desktop session, because you can run a new login shell from the desktop session). As I said, it is run by default, but not if you have created ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bash_login. You can test by checking or unchecking the checkbox in Edit -> Profile Preferences -> Title and Command -> "Run command as a login shell, and exit then rerun the terminal. You could echo something from .profile to test. – Marty Fried Jan 07 '13 at 21:23
@Selah Your comment helped me more then the actual answer ;) thanks a lot for making the comment! – Aleks Jan 14 '14 at 12:18
2

So if you have created ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bash_login on your system and want to keep them, but still want ~/.profile and from there ~/.bashrc executed, you can source it from your own ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bash_login with a line containing source "$HOME/.profile". Gives you back the colored output of ls also in login shells! – tanius Mar 02 '14 at 11:40
1

Thank you for this post... just an FYI, this worked on RHEL also... – jasonflaherty Oct 12 '21 at 16:04
@jasonflaherty - glad it helped after such a long time. I'm not really surprised it also works with other distros - it's fairly basic. – Marty Fried Oct 13 '21 at 19:39
just realized my terminal was loading zsh instead of bash! changed .zshrc to source aliases from .bash_aliases – Omkar76 Aug 29 '22 at 06:56
Thank you, it seems cPanel overwrites default .bash_profile with it's own greeting message, causing this issue – Marco Marsala Feb 28 '24 at 07:16

score 76 · Answer 2 · edited May 06 '16 at 19:23

76

In my case, simply the .bashrc loader lines were missing in .bash_profile

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

I added it manually and it worked with my fresh login

edited May 06 '16 at 19:23

answered May 06 '16 at 08:30

user3584014

861

7

.bash_profile? Ubuntu uses a .profile by default, not .bash_profile. – muru May 06 '16 at 08:30

score 17 · Answer 3 · edited Jan 10 '17 at 05:48

17

.bash_profile holds configuration for the bash shell. When you open a terminal, it first reads and executes commands from ~/.bash_profile. So you can add the following in .bash_profile to setup the shell according to bashrc.

. ~/.bashrc

edited Jan 10 '17 at 05:48

muru

197,895
55
485
740

answered Jan 10 '17 at 04:42

SD.

271

Unless your terminal is running a login shell (which it doesn't by default in Ubuntu), ~/.bash_profile won't be read (and it doesn't exist by default in Ubuntu) – muru Jan 10 '17 at 05:49

score 10 · Answer 4 · edited Jul 08 '21 at 10:30

10

According to the comment in .profile

# ~/.profile: executed by the command interpreter for login shells.
# This file is not read by bash(1), if ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bash_login
# exists.

So there you go; if ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bash_login exists, those will get run instead of ~/.profile.

If you want to run ~/.bashrc just add the line source ~/.bashrc in bash_profile.

edited Jul 08 '21 at 10:30

Zanna

70,465

answered Jun 02 '19 at 23:19

Nic Wanavit

476
4
9

1

I have experienced the exact same issue. My .bashrc was being sourced until I created a .bash_profile file. So I prepended source ~/.bashrc line to my .bash_profile file. – Lashae Aug 29 '19 at 06:22

score 7 · Answer 5 · answered Nov 11 '13 at 05:53

7

If $BASH_VERSION is not set, try using the chsh command to set your shell to /bin/bash.

I had a similar issue with 12.04 LTS, and it turned out the new user account had the default shell set to /bin/sh, which was the cause of the problem.

answered Nov 11 '13 at 05:53

evan_b

170

This was the reason! – mulya Sep 24 '15 at 19:21
9 years later, and still ubuntu creates new users with a broken shell... :-/ – yms Feb 05 '22 at 14:46

score 4 · Answer 6 · edited Jul 08 '21 at 10:28

4

It was pretty simple for me. I installed mssqltools and somehow it created a file bash_profile in $HOME directory. As bash_profile runs before bashrc is picked up, if you don't have a source command in bash_profile, bashrc won't run.

There are two ways to tackle this, either delete bash_profile or if you use bash_profile, just add the following line anywhere in the file

source ~/.bashrc

edited Jul 08 '21 at 10:28

Zanna

70,465

answered May 10 '21 at 09:26

redzack

145

1

In my case, meteor installed a .bash_profile. adding source ~/.bashrc worked! – dansch Aug 29 '22 at 19:56

score 2 · Answer 7 · answered Nov 09 '22 at 09:42

On Ubuntu 20.x in order for the .bashrc to be read when a terminal is opened, you should copy the template .profile into the user directory (.bashrc is loaded from .profile):

sudo cp /etc/skel/.profile ~/.profile && sudo chown $(whoami):$(whoami) ~/.profile

.bashrc not executed when opening new terminal

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