Peter Davis <p...@pfdstudio.com> writes: > On 10/27/15 12:45 PM, Rainer M Krug wrote: > > Nick Dokos <ndo...@gmail.com> writes: > > If OS X does not use $HOME/.profile to initialize the environment of > programs > (even in the graphical enviroment), that seems to me to be a serious > bug. > > Aparently it is not. > > According to > <http://www.science.unitn.it/~fiorella/guidelinux/gs/node153.html>, .profile > is > bash-specific. tcsh has a different set of login/session initialization files. >
No, it does not say that .profile is bash-specific at all: it just says it's used by bash and not used by tcsh. What *is* specific to bash is $HOME/.bash_profile. $HOME/.profile is used by the original Bourne shell and its descendants, ksh and bash - Wikipedia says it's also used by zsh. AFAIK, it is mandated by POSIX. It is not used by csh and its descendants (they use .login instead). But when setting up the window environment on Linux, the various scripts are executed by whatever POSIX shell is available on the system (usually sh on Linux), because a POSIX shell is supposed to be part of a POSIX system, so guaranteed to be available (which is not true of csh/tcsh). Hence .profile is the common denominator. -- Nick
