OSXFAQ Mac OS X UNIX Tip-of-the-Day  

Week 105 - Controlling Bash At Startup (18 April 2005)

by Adrian Mayo - Editor, OSXFAQ

Thursday - Prevent Execution of Initialisation Scripts

To prevent bash from running /etc/profile and ~/.bash_profile when it is invoked as a login shell use:

To prevent a non-login shell from running /etc/bashrc and ~/.bashrc invoke on the command line as:

To create a login shell from the command line use:

To have a 'noprofile' shell option in X11, use the X11 menu bar Applications::Customise... to add a new item. Call the item something like xterm-np and make the command:

Note that we tell xterm to run a command with the -e option. If no option is given it runs bash in a default manner.

Fink. Beware! If you source the Fink initialisation script, for example:

the script checks to see if '/sw/bin' and '/sw/sbin' are already in the path. If not it adds them to the start of the path. Fink includes its own version of bash which does not read /etc/profile but reads /sw/etc/profile. This can confuse matters if you try to start a login shell by typing 'bash --login'. To avoid any problems add '/sw/bin' and '/sw/sbin' to the end of your path before you call '/sw/bin/init.sh', or else make an alias to the correct bash, or else invoke it directly with '/bin/bash'

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