Startup Sequences of Shells

dingyichen.wordpress.com

32 points·onosendai··6 comments

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

"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."

Note that what the man pages say happens (as of 2013) is in this diagram:

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

I thought maybe this just had a bad UI layout on mobile, but after reviewing on desktop browser, I now know that this useful info was just presented rather poorly.

Do you think factually incorrect or rather poorly displayed?

Bash is broken in this regard, having no way to reliably enforce a consistent baseline across the four possible startup modes except by having all the possible startup files explicitly call some shared source. Glad to see zsh has addressed this.

My first distro was Gentoo which has engineered around the problems in bash. Needless to say I didn't learn that they had engineered around it until I went to other distros and learned that the default behavior is not user friendly (to say the least). The complete inconsistency of implementations also means that searching and reading forums can often be counterproductive.

thanks for this - very useful

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