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When ever I close and open Terminal.app, it never loads my ~/.bash_profile. I have my RVM setup at the top of the file but it never loads it.

As you can see, when I type rvm into Terminal, it says command not found this is a pain as I have to run source ~/.bash_login every time I open Terminal.

rvm command not found

Am I the only one with this problem? What am I doing wrong?

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  • Out of curiosity, what does your Terminal preferences window, under the 'Startup' tab look like? – Jason Salaz Aug 16 '11 at 20:03
  • They show this: i.qyk.in/loD8A.png – Dean Perry Aug 16 '11 at 20:08
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    Strange, considering the bash man page: When bash is invoked as an interactive login shell, or as a non-interactive shell with the --login option, it first reads and executes commands from the file /etc/profile, if that file exists. After reading that file, it looks for ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login, and ~/.profile, in that order, and reads and executes commands from the first one that exists and is readable. The --noprofile option may be used when the shell is started to inhibit this behavior. And that /usr/bin/login setting is self-explanatory... – Jason Salaz Aug 16 '11 at 20:55
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    "it never loads my ~/.bash_profile" "I have to run source ~/.bash_login" Which is it? Are you using ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bash_login? Only one of them will be run. – Chris Page Aug 19 '11 at 11:21
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Does it have to be .bash_login? Try renaming it to .profile.

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  • Or .bash_profile - which works – Rene Larsen Aug 14 '11 at 17:34
  • This is very surprising. ~/.bash_login should work just as well as ~/.bash_profile. It works for me. You can put an echo .bash_login at the start of ~/.bash_login to see whether it gets run. Of course, it won't be run if you also have ~/.bash_profile. – Chris Page Aug 19 '11 at 11:26
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Bash only reads the .bash_login file if it's started as a login shell (was passed the --login flag). Try renaming it to .bashrc instead, which is evaluated when bash was invoked as an interactive shell without the --login flag.

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  • I have tried .bashrc but it does the same – Dean Perry Aug 14 '11 at 17:29
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    Prior to Lion, Terminal creates login shells unless you provide a custom command in Preferences > Startup or Preferences > Settings > [profile] > Shell. As of Mac OS X Lion 10.7, Terminal always creates login shells, even for custom commands, if they're listed in /etc/shells. – Chris Page Aug 19 '11 at 11:15
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Make sure your .bash_login script doesn't contain relative paths like

source .profile

Change to

source ~/.profile

Lion changes the directory to your current tab or where your last session is, so all paths have to be absolute now.

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For me bash in Lion does not load ~/.profile either.

Adding source ~/.profile command to run at startup in shell preferences helped, but is quite unelegant.

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  • Check your preferences to ensure you haven’t done something to suppress the creation of a login shell. Is anything in Terminal > Preferences > Settings > [profile] > Shell > Startup or Terminal > Preferences > Startup > Shells open with customized? – Chris Page Mar 10 '12 at 23:06
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Changing .bashrc from

source .bash_profile

to

source ~/.bash_profile

did the trick for me.

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    I recommend going the other direction: Have ~/.bash_profile source ~/.bashrc. Put all the stuff you want to be common to login and non-login shells into ~/.bashrc. ~/.bash_profile should only contain configuration commands for login shells. – Chris Page Sep 8 '11 at 11:55
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The default behavior on my MacBook running Sierra (I don't know about High Sierra) seems to be that Terminal will run .bash_profile on login.

Only if .bash_profile does not exist will Terminal go and run .bash_login instead.

Check to make sure that you do not have an empty .bash_profile sitting around in your home directory. If you do, delete it and re-login; then you should see Terminal running your .bash_login.

(Empirically: my MacBook does not open or run either .profile or .bashrc. But indeed, I can disable my .bash_login by running touch ~/.bash_profile, and restore it to working order by running rm ~/.bash_profile.)

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