Bash Initialisation Files – which one will get executed? (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Bash Initialisation Files – which one will get executed? (2012)

solipsys.co.uk

47 pointsColinWright14 comments

Direct link to the image (which is pretty much the actual content of the entry) since you can't just click on it to make it bigger:

http://www.solipsys.co.uk/images/BashStartupFiles1.png

(note the author does warn "it's incomplete, but probably a reasonable place to start".)

Here is another one that is useful, but it's always good when someone does the digging and figuring out for themselves.

http://blog.flowblok.id.au/static/images/shell-startup-actua...

I was just about to post this. This one also covers zsh and plain sh.

Cool.

What are the colours?

"To read it, pick your shell, whether it's a login shell, whether it's interactive, and follow the same colour through the diagram. When the arrows split out to multiple files, it means that the shell will try to read each one in turn (working left to right), and will use the first one it can read."

Original article here: http://blog.flowblok.id.au/2013-02/shell-startup-scripts.htm...

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4369934

It took me too long to see the image as an image, and not as the blank space of an ignored ad.

But..probably my problem. :-)

Not really, the layout of that page is tragically poor.

Interesting - works fine for me on all the platforms I've used.

Can you send me a screen shot? Thanks. I'd like to know why you call the layout "tragically poor".

FWIW, I'm often running over very slow links, so the load time really matters for me. That's why the page is utterly minimal, and I'm really surprised that people are finding that it takes a long time to load.

Really surprised. That's why I'd like to know more.

The image happens to be in part of the page that on most pages would be occupied by an ad. So I ignored it out of habit.

Put it under the text and I would have found it immediately.

To me, Putting it underneath divorces it from the text and makes me flip up and down, rather than having it immediately there for reference. I've added a comment in the text that the diagram is there on the right, and I'd hope that seeing that would make the reader glance at it, and see that it really is relevant, and not an ad.

Odd, isn't it, how the ubiquitous ads have trained us to ignore parts of a page that would otherwise be a useful part of the reading experience. Thanks for pointing this out to me so I can keep it in mind.

It's small, scaled, and off to the right of the introductory text. It's the primary content of the page, and yet exactly not where anyone would expect to see primary content.

My issue isn't load time, it's that the image, which is most important, is divorced from the text, while the comment field, which is not important, appears as the primary content below the introduction.

It does occupy space that would often be occupied by an ad, but in another context it occupies space that would be a sidebar or peripheral illustration to the primary text in a textbook. Informative but not the key item.

http://i.imgur.com/EFlBPVc.png

I'm always surprised when people choose to read text in very, very long lines. I've found that 10 to 15 words per line speeds my reading a lot. But equally, I don't want to force that on other people, and I find it really annoying when people have web sites that are effectively narrow columns in a wide, blank (or filled with ads) screen.

Do you always only read websites in a maximised window?

Anyway, I'm moving the image to the other side. I can easily squash the text into a fixed width column - do you think that would be better?

In OSX terminal, .bash_profile send to be called on every opened window or tab. On my Debian server, .bashrc seems to be called, as well as inside every screen window

Reply on news.ycombinator.com