Change $TERMINFO in bashrc script

Question

I'm trying to set TERMINFO="$HOME/.terminfo" within my .bashrc script. The reason being is that my terminal isn't in the system terminfo location, and so I have its terminfo file in my home directory.
The problem here is that the change doesn't take effect for the current shell, only subshells. I'm guessing it's because readline is being initialized before bash reads the .bashrc file.

So is there any way to solve this issue? Perhaps some way to re-initialize readline so the changed $TERMINFO takes effect?
I'm trying to avoid doing an exec bash after setting it, as then I have to make sure I don't end up in a re-exec loop, and that's just ugly (though doing exec bash after setting it does work).

EDIT: This is not a issue running the script. I know for a fact the .bashrc script is being run and that $TERMINFO is being set. Running echo $TERMINFO after the shell has finished starting shows the correct value.

EDIT2: It appears this might be bash or readline library version related. I can't duplicate the issue with bash-4.2.20 and readline-6.2_p1, but I can with bash-3.2 and readline-5.1.3.

"No" is an acceptable answer if it's not possible. But it would be nice to know what's going on that causes the answer to be "no".

Answer 1

So after digging around some more, I found what's going on. RHEL5's build of bash doesn't use terminfo at all (why, who knows, it's Red Hat), it uses termcap. However, there is apparently another bash on the box which does use terminfo. This is why subshells and re-execing would work, as they would use the other bash, not the default one. I feel stupid for not noticing this.

This can be determined from comparing 2 commands:

# ldd "$BASH"
    linux-vdso.so.1 =>  (0x00007fff4f1fd000)
    libtermcap.so.2 => /lib64/libtermcap.so.2 (0x0000003e0bc00000)
    libdl.so.2 => /lib64/libdl.so.2 (0x0000003e07000000)
    libc.so.6 => /lib64/libc.so.6 (0x0000003e06c00000)
    /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x0000003e06800000)

# ldd `which bash`
    linux-vdso.so.1 =>  (0x00007fff643fd000)
    libncurses.so.5 => /usr/lib64/libncurses.so.5 (0x0000003e0d800000)
    libdl.so.2 => /lib64/libdl.so.2 (0x0000003e07000000)
    libc.so.6 => /lib64/libc.so.6 (0x0000003e06c00000)
    /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x0000003e06800000)

Noticing that one is linked against libtermcap, and the other against libncurses.

I should have specified that I was using RHEL here, as that's apparently the critical factor. Why they use termcap when pretty much everyone else in the world has abandoned it makes no sense, but there it is.

Answer 2

From man bash - the invocation section:

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.

To set up your environment, include the terminfo line (and any other environmental variables you would like to set) in either .bash_profile or .profile.

See this Superuser answer for more detail.

Answer 3

bash only reads .bashrc when it starts.

So you need to do source ~/.bashrc to re-load it in the current session.