I have read so many suggestions about, not putting your customization aka commands in ".profile" file. Rather, create a .bash_profile for yourself and add your alias and etc.
But,when I open the new terminal, if there is only .bash_profile, OS X is not exporting/sourcing the commands mentioned in it. I have to manually source the .bash_profile.
If I create .profile file, on opening a new terminal, all my commands in .profile are executed and will be available readily.
Could you please help me in understanding, how does it works? Also, when to use .bashrc/.profile/.bash_profile files.
Thanks!
According to Apple,
zsh (Z shell) is the default shell for all newly created user accounts, starting with macOS Catalina.
So you should verify your default shell with the command:
$ echo $SHELL
If the result is /bin/bash your default shell is BASH, and if the result is /bin/zsh the default is ZSH.
Go to home with $ cd ~/ and create the profile (if it does not exist) and edit it with the commands:
For bash:
$ touch .bash_profile
$ open .bash_profile
For ZSH:
$ touch .zprofile
$ open .zprofile
According to the manual page that ships with OS X:
... 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. The --noprofile option may be used when the shell is started to inhibit this behavior.
It should only read ~/.profile as a last resort if neither ~/.bash_profile nor ~/.bash_login are readable.
On all of my OS X systems, I have my ~/.bash_profile set to:
if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then
source ~/.bashrc
fi
It is highly recommended that you do this on OS X in order to get bash to read your ~/.bashrc file like you would expect.
It's also possible that your terminal shell is defaulting to sh instead of bash. You can verify this first:
$ echo $SHELL
/bin/tcsh
To change this to bash, you can go into your Terminal -> Preferences -> Startup tab, and change "Shell Opens With:" from "Default login shell" to Command and value "/bin/bash".
Alternately, you can change your default shell by executing the following command at the command prompt:
chsh -s bin/bash
After you do one of these, open a new shell window, and your .bash_profile should be sourced.
For anyone else who finds this, instead of bash_profile, for new versions of mac you can use .zshrc. I.E., do
open .zshrc
and add what you need there.
You can use zsh to fix the problem.
The Z shell (also known as zsh) is a Unix shell that is built on top
of bash (the default shell for macOS) with additional features. It's
recommended to use zsh over bash.
Installation
Install zsh using Homebrew: $ brew install zsh
Install Oh My Zsh: $ sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/master/tools/install.sh)"
Move to .bash_profile setting .zshrc file
To apply the changes you make you need to either start new shell
instance or run: source ~/.zshrc
If you are using zsh, you can source to .bash_profile by adding the following line to .zprofile
if [ -f ~/.bash_profile ]; then
source ~/.bash_profile
fi
It should be mentioned that bash will first look for a /etc/profile file, as stated in the Bash man pages.
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. The --noprofile option may be used when the
shell is started to inhibit this behavior.
I solved by simply adding bash (in a newline) into ~/.bash_profile file.
Related
I am seeing a strange problem with the storing of an env in mac os.
I set custom env in ~/.bash_profile
export MYENV=user
Then ran the . ~/.bash_profile and then I printed the env using
printenv then I can see the MYENV=user in the list.
If I close the terminal and reopen and execute printenv then I could not see MYENV in the list still I can see the export MYENV=user in ~/.bash_profile. It seems strange to me.
I am using Mac os High Sierra 10.13.6.
Could some body please tell me what mistake I am doing?
Note that ~/.bash_profile is only run for login shells. From the man page:
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 exe-
cutes commands 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 you terminal isn't launching the shell with -l, --login or with $0 having a leading hyphen it won't be a login shell and thus won't read ~/.bash_profile. You may need to reconfigure how your terminal launches the shell if you want the shell to read that config script.
On the other hand ~/.bashrc is always read by an interactive shell. So if you put the export in that script it should do what you expect. It certainly does for me. You replied to Amila that it didn't work for you. So I'd suggest a simple experiment. Open two terminal windows. In one edit ~/.bashrc and add these two lines:
echo running .bashrc
export WTF=abc
In the other window just run bash. It should echo that message and echo $WTF should print abc. Now open a new terminal window. If you don't see that message and the env var isn't present then something is inhibiting reading that config script. Possibly the shell is being run with the --norc flag.
~/.bash_profile is executed before the initial command prompt is returned to the user, which means after a new login. Try adding the environment variable to ~/.bashrc instead.
I am trying to create a permanent alias for my terminal. I put the alias in my ~/.profile, ~/.bashrc, and ~/.bash_profile files, previously empty. When I start a new terminal, bash does not recognize the alias, but if I source any of them, it does. Why are these not getting run when I open a terminal? I am on OSX.
Newer MacOS versions use zsh as the default shell for both Terminal and iTerm2. Run echo $SHELL to confirm if this is the case for you.
Zsh looks for a .zshrc file upon shell startup, so to continue using zsh while sourcing the contents of your bash profile, you can run the following:
echo "source ~/.bash_profile" >> ~/.zshrc
Open a new terminal window for the changes to take effect.
Two things need to happen here when using iTerm to get the loading of dotfiles to work.
First you should add the following to your .bash_profile
[[ -s ~/.bashrc ]] && source ~/.bashrc
Secondly you will need to ensure that in iTerm preferences your terminal is set to launch a login shell.
Hope this helps!
Using the default mac terminal, what worked for me was to add a command to run on start up to source my .bash_profile.
Preferences > Profile > Startup > Add command 'source ~/.bash_profile'
Mac terminal preferences window screenshot
Might be considered to be a bit hacky, but it does the trick.
Adding source ~/.profile to my .bash_profile worked for me.
As of High Sierra, both Terminal and iTerm want to load ~/.profile first. So I suggest you put one line in your .profile to make your Mac work like other Unixes:
source ~/.bash_profile
By editing this one file, you won't have to search through the menus of multiple apps to override Apple's bizarre behavior in each.
As of Catalina the default shell is now zsh. You can change it back to bash with chsh -s /bin/bash and that should load your .profile or .bash_profile
Why are your shell's initialization files not loading?
As with most things, It Depends ™
I recently experienced the same phenomenon and went through the following exercise to resolve it:
I use iTerm. iTerm runs a login shell by default. Verify in iTerm Preferences > General > Command > (*) Login Shell
Therefore, I know that ~/.bash_profile will always be called.
Knowing that, I put the following in my ~/.bash_profile file:
for file in ~/.{bashrc,bash_exports,bash_aliases,bash_functions}; do
[ -r "$file" ] && source "$file"
done
unset file
Notice that I use separate files for .bashrc, .bash_exports, etc. It keeps things separate and simple.
Note also that /etc/profile is loaded first, but since I have never used that system wide init file, I knew that that was not my problem. For details check out $ man bash
So, I started with my ~/.bash_profile file.
I found that when I installed Canopy Express that it's installer replaced the contents of my ~/.bash_profile file with the following content:
# Added by Canopy installer on 2017-04-19
# VIRTUAL_ENV_DISABLE_PROMPT can be set to '' to make the bash prompt show that Canopy is active, otherwise 1
alias activate_canopy="source '/Users/lex/dev/python/User/bin/activate'"
# VIRTUAL_ENV_DISABLE_PROMPT=1 source '/Users/lex/dev/python/User/bin/activate'
p.s. Canopy is an excellent, free python IDE, that I highly recommend.
Fortunately, I backup my ~/.bash* files so restoring that was easy and quickly fixed my issue.
My advice would be to understand the order of calls to your initialization files and start with the first one and work your way through them until you find the problem.
Oh, and you may want to verify which shell you are using (I use bash):
~ $ echo $SHELL
/usr/local/bin/bash
I am guessing you may use another shell, such as bash, tcsh, sh, zsh etc.
Put source .bash_profile into your appropriate 'bashrc' file will make the auto loading recovered, i.e.
.login for tcsh, .bash_profile for bash, .zshrc for zsh
My issue was solved by unchecking Preferences > General > tmux >
Use "tmux" profile rather than profile of the connecting session
Most likely, you need to create the files yourself as they appear not to exist by default. You should give them execute permission to make them run.
~ % sudo chmod 700 ~/.bash_profile
Also, you should check the ownership of the files. They should belong to current user rather than root. Otherwise, you will get permission denied error.
~ % ls -a -l
~ % sudo chown <user_name> ~/.bash_profile
Finally, please note that bash looks in your home directory for .bash_profile, .bash_login, and .profile in order. Bash will stop looking if the first is found.
This means if you have both .bash_profile and .profile files, the .profile will not run.
For more information
Hope this would help you.
Little late to the party but it seems that the file .zprofile is the equivalent to that of .bash_profile when loading zsh. I used this instead to execute a few commands on startup. Of course this only valid for a specific iTerm setup with zsh.
https://zsh.sourceforge.io/Intro/intro_3.html
I've used bash for two years, and just tried to switch to zsh shell on my OS X via homebrew. And I set my default (login) shell to zsh, and I confirmed it's set properly by seeing that when I launch my Terminal, it's zsh shell that is used in default.
However, when I try to enter bash shell from within zsh, it looks like not loading ~/.bash_profile, since I cannot run my command using aliases, which is defined in my ~/.bash_profile like alias julia="~/juila/julia", etc.. Also, the prompt is not what I set in the file and instead return bash-3.2$.
For some reasons, when I set my login shell to bash, and enter zsh from within bash, then ~/.zshrc is loaded properly.
So why is it not loaded whenever I run bash from within zsh? My ~/.bash_profile is symbolic linked to ~/Dropbox/.bash_profile in order to sync it with my other computers. Maybe does it cause the issue?
Open ~/.zshrc, and at the very bottom of the file, add the following:
if [ -f ~/.bash_profile ]; then
. ~/.bash_profile;
fi
Every time you open the terminal, it will load whatever is defined in ~/.bash_profile (if the file exist). With that, you can keep your custom settings for zsh (colors, and etc). And you get to keep your custom shell settings in .bash_profile file.
This is much cleaner than using bash -l IMO.
If you prefer putting your settings in .bashrc, or .bash_login, or .profile , you can do the same for them.
Similarly, you could also move the common profile settings to separate file, i.e. .my_common_profile, and add the following to both .bash_profile and .zshrc:
if [ -f ~/.my_common_profile ]; then
. ~/.my_common_profile;
fi
An interactive bash reads your ~/.bash_profile if it's a login shell, or your ~/.bashrc if it's not a login shell.
A typical .bash_profile will contain something like:
if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then . ~/.bashrc; fi
so .bashrc can contain commands to be executed by either login or non-login shells.
If you run bash -l rather than just bash, it should read your .bash_profile.
Reference: https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Bash-Startup-Files.html
For those who have just installed zsh and want their alias from bash to work on zsh do the following
Open .zshrc file in vim like so
vi ~/.zshrc
Scroll to the bottom
click "i" to enable write mode
Tell zsh to load items from bash_profile when needed like so
source ~/.bash_profile
Write and quit like so
:wq
Refresh your zsh like so
source ~/.zshrc
That's it. Now all your saved alias in .bash_profile will be ready to use in zsh.
To complement #Keith Thompson's excellent answer:
macOS:
As #chepner puts it succinctly (emphasis mine):
In OS X, bash is not used as part of the initial [at boot time] login process, and the Terminal.app (or other terminal emulators) process exists outside any pre-existing bash sessions, so each new window [or tab - read: interactive bash shell] (by default) treats itself as a new login session.
As a result, some OSX users only ever create ~/.bash_profile, and never bother with ~/.bashrc, because ALL interactive bash shells are login shells.
Linux:
On Linux, the situation is typically reversed:
bash shells created interactively are [interactive] NON-login shells, so it is ~/.bashrc that matters.
As a result, many Linux users only ever deal with ~/.bashrc.
To maintain bash profiles that work on BOTH platforms, use the technique #Keith Thompson mentions:
Put your definitions (aliases, functions, ...) in ~/.bashrc
Add the following line to ~/.bash_profile
[[ -f ~/.bashrc ]] && . ~/.bashrc
Copy the contents from ~/.bash_profile and paste them at the bottom of ~/.zshrc file.
For ZSH users on MacOs, I ended up with a one liner.
At the very bottom of the ~/.zshrc I added the following line :
bash -l
What it does is simply load the .bash_profile settings(aliases, function, export $PATH, ...)
If you decide to get rid of ZSH and go back to plain BASH, you'll be back to normal with no hassle at all.
If this is something that you do infrequently, or it just isn't appropriate to make changes, you can also 'source' the .bash_profile after launching the child bash shell.
. ~/.bash_profile
This will pull in the settings you make in the .bash_profile script for the life of that shell session. In most cases, you should be able to repeat that command, so it's also an easy way to test any changes that you make without needing to do a full login, as well as bring all of your existing shell sessions up-to-date if you make upgrades to the .bash_profile &/or .bashrc files.
For macOS Big Sur (Version 11.5.2)
Open .zshrc
For example: sudo nano ~/.zshrc
At the end of the file add source ~/.bash_profile
Every time you open the terminal the contents inside the bash profile will be loaded.
Recently I installed oh-my-zsh on OS X and set zsh as default shell and faced the same problem.
I solved this problem by adding source ~/.bash_profile at the end of .zshrc file.
I am using a zsh framework called oh my zsh and I have tried most of the solutions listed here and it broke the format for my custom theme. However, these steps worked for me.
Add new alias(es) at the bottom of my .bash_profile
vi ~/.bash_profile
Make zsh to load items from .bash_profile
source ~/.bash_profile
Refresh zsh
source ~/.zshrc
Restart OSX Terminal app
Try your new alias!
If you'd like to be "profile-centric", you can create .profile as a single source of truth, then load it from both .bash_profile and .zprofile.
.profile
export PATH="/usr/local/opt/python/libexec/bin:$PATH"
# etc., etc.
.bash_profile and .zprofile
if [ -f ~/.profile ]; then
. ~/.profile;
fi
I found this helped bash scripts find the right PATH, etc., and helped me keep configuration in one place.
I have installed Hadoop and every time I want to run it, first I have to do this:
source ~/.bash_profile
or it won't recognize the command hadoop
Why is that?
I am on OSX 10.8
Now that we've narrowed down the problem:
Run ps -p $$ at the command line to check if you are, in fact, using a bash shell.
Realize that you are in zsh, which means you should be editing your profile in .zshrc.
Copy the offending lines from .bash_profile to .zshrc, OR
Modify your .zshrc to directly source your .bash_profile.
UPDATE: Do what #TC1 mentions in the comments and keep the shell-specific code in each shell's own profile, and from those profiles, only source shell-agnostic code.
On Mac Catalina, I just had to open "preferences" on terminal and change the "shells open with" from "default" to "Command(complete path)", which the default path was "/bin/zsh". touch ~/.zshrc, if that file doesn't exist already, and copy/paste your stuff from ".bash_profile" into the ".zshrc" file.
To elaborate, with terminal running, I opened "settings" from the Terminal menu on the Mac navbar. On the "General" tab, look for "Shells open with" select "Command (complete path)", and type in /bin/zsh.
bash_profile.sh is applicable for bash shell.
if your default shell is not bash and if your default shell is someother shell for example zsh then you have to manually load the .bash_profile using source ~/.bash_profile.
You can always change the default shell to bash shell so that the .bash_profile file will be automatically loaded.
Inorder to automatically load .bash_profile, you can update your default shell to bash using the command chsh -s /bin/bash
cat /etc/shells will list the default shells available in the
machine
echo $SHELL will display the currently active shell in your machine
To change active shell to a different shell, use chsh -s /bin/bash.
Then echo $SHELL to verify if the shell has changed.
Terminal -> Preference -> profile -> Shell -> Run command : source ~/.bash_profile
Tick on run inside shell.
After doing all those , just logout and check weather everything works fine or not
I tried the approved answer. Changing the .zshrc file works for one of my machines. But for the other one, when I run ps -p $$, it is -sh under the command. And I changed both bash and zsh files, neither of them works for me this time.
So I found this
https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Bash-Startup-Files.html
it mentioned
"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. "
so I went to that file /etc/profile and add "source ~/.bashrc" in that file. Then it works since every time a terminal is opened, it runs the command in that /etc/profile file.
Not sure if this is the best solution but it works.
sudo nano /etc/bashrc and change that, restarted the terminal and it finally remembered with command. Tried ~/.bash_profile and ~/.bashrc without success, just wasn't sourcing it.
Go to “Preferences/Profiles then look in the right window and find “shell”.
Once in that if your “Startup Run Command” hasn’t been turned on. Click the box to turn it on and in the command section type:
(If you made a .zsh file)
source .zsh ; clear
(If you made a .bash_profile)
source .bash_profile ; clear
Doing this ; clear
Will clear your terminal to a new page so that you don’t see your terminal display:
“Last login: etc
User#user-Mac ~ % source .zsh
If you typed the commands as I said you should just get this:
User#user-Mac ~ %
That way you will be greeted with a clear page with no extra jumbo. Also to make sure that your .zsh or .bash_profile aliases work type the following command to see a list of your custom aliases:
Alias
One alias I like to do is
alias LL=“ls -la”
This will display a tree or the directory you are in as well as hidden files.
I have a couple of bash scripts that I want to make sure runs by default and I'm currently storing them in ~/.profile on my mac. Is that the wrong place to be storing them? I've heard of others and tried them (like ~/.bashrc, ~/.bash_profile, etc), but they don't seem to be working.
What is the difference between all of these and which one do I put the scripts in so that it configures on runtime and I don't have to call $ source ~/.profile every time I open the terminal?
If both ~/.bash_profile and ~/.profile exist, bash only reads ~/.bash_profile when it is invoked as an interactive login shell.
https://www.gnu.org/s/bash/manual/html_node/Bash-Startup-Files.html:
Invoked as an interactive login shell, or with --login
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 commands from the first one that exists and is readable.
[...]
Invoked as an interactive non-login shell
When an interactive shell that is not a login shell is started, Bash reads and executes commands from ~/.bashrc, if that file exists.
~/.profile is also used by other shells.
Terminal and iTerm open new shells as login shells by default (by executing something like login -pf $USER), but many GNU/Linux terminal applications open new shells as non-login shells. OS X users often use ~/.bash_profile instead of ~/.bashrc.
+-----------------+
| |
interactive shell -->| ~/.bashrc |
| |
+-----------------+
interactive shell will source ~/.bashrc automatically.
Take a look at Should the .bashrc in the home directory load automatically?
I did these to rectify the problem:
cat .bash_profile >> .profile
rm .bash_profile
the alternative is:
echo "source ~/.profile" >> .bash_profile
Make sure if you do source ~/.profile in your .bashrc that you comment out or remove any commands (in .profile) to call or source .bashrc in your .profile or it will loop forever and you will never get a prompt.
Different setups of bash will automatically source different files depending on their configuration. The nearly universal file that is always sourced is ~/.bashrc - this is a bash core thing that it will load this file. In that file, you should add your line to source ~/.profile and you'll be good to go!
-Edit-
From my Linux and my colleague's Mac:
$ echo "echo hello" >> ~/.profile
$ echo "source ~/.profile" >> ~/.bashrc
$ bash
Hello
$