Thanks to the pair of you. I meant to reply after the first reply where I did testing using xterm and found that "yes, bash is different". It does in fact use a .bashrc file (one file amongst about 7-8 I had tried), and anyway, within .bashrc it was defined without any inheritance. ie, it did not include the previous settings of path, it was defined outright. Once I fixed it, it brought in the inheritance of all the previously set paths.
I havent tried the bash profile one since the bashrc works fine. This message posted from opensolaris.org
