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Terminal started to ignore profile file settings, which I didn't change in a long time. How can I force Terminal to respect the file again? I tried to delete and recreate but it didn't help...

My setup is Lion 10.7.3, Terminal.app reports version 2.2.2 (303). ~/.profile file has following attributes: -rw-r--r--@

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Can you show us the contents of your profile? Here's what my profile looks like: -rw-r--r-- 1 martin staff 48 Sep 14 23:59 .profile – Martín Marconcini Mar 13 '12 at 11:58
@Martín: Extended attributes for profile file are: com.apple.FinderInfo 32 and com.apple.TextEncoding 15. Dunno what it means. The content of the file has not changed and was working so far... – delirus Mar 13 '12 at 13:21

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Ok, what shell (bash, zsh, ...) are you using? Bash for instance reads .profile in absence of .bash_profile and .bash_login, though of you are NOT using bash as a login shell it will most likely go straight to .bashrc

A similar question was asked on this forum before, and pjmorse added this link:

http://hayne.net/MacDev/Notes/unixFAQ.html#shellStartup

which describes what files are read, and in what order, by a shell in OSX.

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Problem solved. The link you provided was really helpful. It turned out that .bash_login was executed instead of my .profile file. .bash_login was created as a result of Ruby Version Manger (rvm) installation on my machine. – delirus Mar 13 '12 at 13:29

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