Cannot see aliases

Question

I have my root user and another user testuser. Now in the .bashrc of testuser, there are some aliases like la for ls -a. But when I login to testuser and try running la, it gives me the error: -sh: la: not found

Even when I try to find $HOME, it says Permission denied (?)

This is slowing down my work!! Help!

Answer 1

The message from the shell begins with -sh. This gives two important clues:

• The leading - indicates that this is a login shell. By convention, the login program (the program where you type your user name and password, which can be login, gdm, sshd, …) starts a shell with the program name set to begin with an extra -. This way, the shell knows that it's a login shell and reads ~/.profile or other session startup file.
• The shell's name is sh. So the user's login shell is set to /bin/sh, and not to bash. Either /bin/sh is a symbolic link to bash, or it's some other shell such as dash. When bash is invoked under the name sh, it doesn't read its configuration files, only the standard files (~/.profile and /etc/profile in login shells, nothing in non-login shells), for compatibility. So either way ~/.bashrc is not read.

If you explicitly invoke bash, it will read .bashrc. You'll need to pass the -t flag to ssh to tell it to open a terminal even though you've specified a command.

ssh -t testuser@nameofhost bash

You may want to switch the user's login shell to be bash instead of /bin/sh. As testuser, run the command

chsh -s /bin/bash

Change the path to /usr/local/bin/bash or wherever bash is located. If you invoke chsh without arguments, you'll get a menu showing what shells you're allowed to select.

Answer 2

You can check your system wide /etc/bashrc and/or /etc/profile files. Also you can add something like this to the files:

if [ `whoami` == "testuser" ] 
then  
   alias x='echo x' # alias list..
fi