On Mon, 26 Jul 2010 21:42:24 -0500, Tim Chase wrote: >> Please! Never export anything from your .bashrc unless you >> really know what you're doing. Almost all exports should be >> done in your .bash_profile > > Could you elaborate on your reasoning why (or why-not)? I've > found that my .bash_profile doesn't get evaluated when I crank up > another terminal window, while my bashrc does. Thus I tend to > put my exports in my ~/.bashrc so they actually take effect in my > shell...
Ideally, whichever program spawns the terminal window should have all of the environment settings from your ~/.profile (although you may have to explicitly source it from e.g. ~/.xsession), so it shouldn't be necessary to export them again. Using ~/.bashrc is a band-aid in case your desktop session doesn't already have your environment settings. But it only works for shells (and only for bash shells, and only for interactive bash shells), while your environment settings should be available to everything, regardless of whether it was spawned from an interactive bash shell or from some other program. Also, if you update environment variables with e.g.: export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin any nested shells end up getting multiple updates. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list