A user's home directory contains both ~/.bash_profile and ~/.profile. Settings added to ~/.profile have no effect when the user logs in at a console. What explains this?
LPIC-1 Exam 102-500, objective 105. Shells and shell scripting medium
Machine-checked — no person has signed for it. This question was read against the source cited below by an automated pass, which found no contradiction. That is a weaker claim than it sounds: the same kind of process wrote the question, so it can confirm its own mistake.
Treat it as a good draft rather than as settled fact, and read the source below before you rely on it. It is not used in mock exams here — only questions a person has signed for are.
How these questions are written — where each question comes from, what the verification ledger records, and what happens when one is found wrong.
The options
Correct A login shell reads only the first of ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login and ~/.profile that exists, so ~/.bash_profile wins and ~/.profile is never read
Correct. Bash stops after the first of those three files it finds, in exactly that order. With ~/.bash_profile present, the other two are ignored.
Not correct ~/.profile is only for the Bourne shell and bash never reads it under any circumstances
Wrong. Bash reads ~/.profile happily, but only when neither ~/.bash_profile nor ~/.bash_login exists. That fallback is what makes a single ~/.profile work for both sh and bash.
Not correct Both files are read, but ~/.bash_profile is read last and overwrites the settings
Wrong. Only one of the three is read at all. If both were read, appending rather than overwriting values in ~/.profile would fix the problem, and it does not.
Not correct ~/.profile is read only by non-login interactive shells, which a console login is not
Wrong. The file read by interactive non-login shells is ~/.bashrc. None of the profile files is consulted for a non-login shell.
Why
For an interactive login shell bash reads /etc/profile, then the first readable file among ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login and ~/.profile, and stops there. That ordering is the reason many distributions ship only ~/.profile: adding a ~/.bash_profile silently disables it. The usual fix is to make the file that does get read source the other one, or to keep all shell settings in ~/.bashrc and source ~/.bashrc from the profile.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- manual page bash(1)
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a short set from objective 105 and space the ones you get wrong.
More questions on this objective
- A user logs in at a text console, and bash starts as an interactive login shell. Which file in that user's home directory is read by bash itself as part of login startup? machine-checked
- You are already logged in to a graphical desktop and open a new terminal window, so bash starts as an interactive shell that is not a login shell. Which per-user file does bash read in that case? machine-checked
- An executable script contains only the line `export EDITOR=vim`. After running it as `./setenv.sh`, `echo $EDITOR` in the calling shell prints nothing. What explains this? machine-checked
- In bash, what is the effect of `export MYVAR`? machine-checked
- At a bash prompt you run `alias ll='ls -l'` and it works for the rest of that session, but a terminal window opened afterwards does not recognise `ll`. Which statement explains this and gives the standard remedy? machine-checked
- A command finishes and the shell reports an exit status of 0. What does that mean, and which parameter reports it? machine-checked