Alternative to .bashrc

Question

Is ~/.bashrc the only place where I can specify user specific ENV Variables, aliases, modifications to PATH variable, etc?

I ask because it seems that ~/.bashrc would be bash only...

Answer 1

The file $HOME/.profile is used by a number of shells, including bash, sh, dash, and possibly others.

From the bash man page:

When bash is invoked as an interactive login shell, ... 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.

csh and tcsh explicitly don't look at ~/.profile but those shells are kinda antiquated.

Answer 2

~/.profile is the right place for environment variable definitions and for non-graphical programs that you want to run when you log in (e.g. ssh-agent, screen -m). It is executed by your login shell if that is a Bourne-style shell (sh, ksh, bash). Zsh runs ~/.zprofile instead, and Csh and tcsh run ~/.login.

If you log in under an X display manager (xdm, gdm, kdm, ...), whether ~/.profile is run depends how your display manager and perhaps desktop environment were configured by your distribution. If you log in under a “custom session”, that usually executes ~/.xsession.

~/.bashrc is the right place for bash-specific settings, such as aliases, functions, shell options and prompts. As the name indicates, it is specific to bash; csh has ~/.cshrc, ksh has ~/.kshrc, and zsh has <drumroll> ~/.zshrc.

See also:
Difference between .bashrc and .bash_profile
Which setup files should be used for setting up environment variables with bash?
Zsh not hitting ~/.profile

Answer 3

There is no such thing like a environment config file for different shells, because its even shell specific how they are defined.

In csh you use setenv in bash you use export to define them.

Anyway you could write your own config file and include it with source in the dotfiles of your shells.

Answer 4

There is no common file, but you can make every shell read from a common file.

1. bash reads from .bash_profile and .bashrc
2. zsh reads from .zprofile and .zshrc
3. ksh reads from .profile and $ENV

So here's what I do:

~/.shrc

# put all my aliases and environment variables here

~/.bashrc

source ~/.shrc
# and put any bash-specific settings here

~/.zshrc

source ~/.zshrc
# and put any zsh-specific settings here

~/.profile

ENV=$HOME/.env
. "$ENV"

~/.bash_profile

source ~/.profile

~/.zprofile

source ~/.profile

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If you have root access to the system, another way is to set up pam_env.

You can put

session optional pam_env.so user_envfile=.env

in the relevant /etc/pam.d file (e.g. /etc/pam.d/common-session on Debian), and then when the user logs in, PAM will read environment variables from ~/.env.

Note that pam_env basically only supports VAR=value entries.

More info:

• pam_env