trouble getting .shrc to take

[Polytropon]

On Wed, 26 Sep 2012 23:08:27 -0600, Gary Aitken wrote:
> Having set my shell to either sh or bash,
> I can't seem to get .shrc to take.
> If I have a .shrc that looks like:
> 
>   PROMPT_DIRTRIM=3;   export PROMPT_DIRTRIM
>   PS1=\\w$ ; export PS1
> 
> PS1 is not defined when I log in, and the prompt is set to the default instead.
> 
> If I do
>   ./.shrc
> nothing seems to change;
> although executing the above commands from the shell itself works.
> 
> What am I missing?

As far as I see from "man sh", the system's shell does not
support PROMPT_DIRTRIM, so it's a bash feature.

According to "man bash", its initialisation file is called
~/.bashrc. For example, if I put

	export PS1="\u@\h:\w\$ "

into ~/.bashrc and execute bash, I get a standard prompt. So
it should only be a matter of the correct file name.

Note that bash has several files it can process at startup
time, such as .bash_login, .profile and .bashrc. Their order
is described in the manual, e. g.

	When  bash is invoked as an interactive login shell, or as a non-inter-
	active shell with the --login option, it first reads and executes  com-
	mands  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 commands from the first one that
	exists and is readable.  

	When an interactive shell that is not a login shell  is  started,  bash
	reads  and executes commands from ~/.bashrc, if that file exists.  This
	may be inhibited by using the --norc option.  The --rcfile file  option
	will  force  bash  to  read  and  execute commands from file instead of
	~/.bashrc.

You can find more information in the "INVOCATION" section of the
manual at "man bash". There are files for per-user configuration
as well as system-wide files.



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...