Skip to Main Content
Linux in a Nutshell, Fourth Edition
book

Linux in a Nutshell, Fourth Edition

by Ellen Siever, Stephen Figgins, Aaron Weber
June 2003
Beginner to intermediate content levelBeginner to intermediate
944 pages
43h 1m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Linux in a Nutshell, Fourth Edition

Chapter 7. bash: The Bourne-Again Shell

bash is the GNU version of the standard Bourne shell—the original Unix shell—and incorporates many popular features from other shells such as csh, tcsh, and the Korn shell (ksh). Both tcsh, which is described in the following chapter, and ksh, which offers many of the features in this chapter, are also available on most distributions of Linux. But bash is the standard Linux shell, loaded by default when most user accounts are created.

If executed as part of the user’s login, bash starts by executing any commands found in /etc/profile . Then it executes the commands found in ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login, or ~/.profile (searching for each file only if the previous file is not found). Many distributions change shell defaults in /etc/profile for all users, even changing the behavior of common commands like ls.

In addition, every time it starts (as a subshell or a login shell), bash looks for a file named ~/.bashrc. Many system administration utilities create a small ~/.bashrc automatically, and many users create quite large startup files. Any commands that can be executed from the shell can be included. A small sample file may look like this (each feature can be found either in this chapter or in Chapter 3):

# Set bash variable to keep 50 commands in history. HSTSIZE=50 # # Set prompt to show current working directory and history number of # command. PS1='\w: Command \!$ ' # # Set path to search for commands in my directories, then standard ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Linux in a Nutshell, 6th Edition

Linux in a Nutshell, 6th Edition

Ellen Siever, Stephen Figgins, Robert Love, Arnold Robbins
Linux in Action

Linux in Action

David Clinton
Hands-On System Programming with Linux

Hands-On System Programming with Linux

Kaiwan N. Billimoria, Tigran Aivazian
Embedded Linux for Developers

Embedded Linux for Developers

Alexandru Vaduva, Alex González, Chris Simmonds

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596004826