Is it possible to define where the .bash_profile is located on the bash command line?

Question

I'm running bash programmatically from objective c to create a terminal-like application. Once launched I would like to execute some commands prior to turning control over to the user. Normally these would be in the .bash_profile. This file is not accessible to me and not something I would want to mess we anyway as I don't want to effect the standard bash environment for the user. I tried the -c script.sh switch but after script.sh is done running, bash exits. Are there any other options I have other than programmatically typing out the command I need run? I would rather not have the user see everything.

Answer 1

You could try the following:

bash --rcfile <your_rc_file> --noprofile -i

What the options mean:

• --rcfile: Use the following as the startup file
• --noprofile: Do not process the files .bash_profile, .profile, /etc/profile, etc. Files used normally in login shell.
• -i: Its an interactive shell (kinda like opposite of -c which exits onces the argument to -c is processed).

The manpage of bash is quite good. You could use it for more details on how bash can be launched.

Answer 2

You can invoke bash with --rcfile myfile and have test -f ~/.bashrc && source ~/.bashrc at the end of myfile. This assumes you're launching an interactive but non-login shell.

For a login shell you would have to mimic bash's behavior with regard to /etc/profile, .profile, .bash_profile, .bash_login and .bash_logout, which is tedious but doable. You would still run bash --rcfile myfile but myfile would contain

test -r /etc/profile && source /etc/profile

for f in ~/.bash_profile ~/.bash_login ~/.profile
do
   if test -r $f
   then
      source $f
      break
   fi
done

trap 'source ~/.bash_logout' 0