I have a couple of alias' in my .bash_profile. Im not sure how they got there but they have been causing my terminal to prompt an error on each of their respective lines.

If Im not mistaken I thought that .bashrc was used for alias' and .bash_profile was used for pathing info. Could this be the cause of the errors? Should I remove the lines...

alias l='ls -l'
alias today='date+"%A,%B%-d,%Y"

...because neither give any output when I enter them.

bash_profile is used in login shells and bashrc for non-login. If you're running an xterm and launch another with 'rxvt -ls' the aliases should work. Remove them if you don't like them; use them if you do.

Assuming RH doesn't do something bizarre.

-- And they got there by RH putting them in, probably.

Yeah I believe RH put em in there. However when I run the

rxvt -ls

in bash it errors: command not found.

I ran a locate...

psyklops@mobilenode00 psyklops]$ locate rxvt
/usr/share/terminfo/r/rxvt-16color
/usr/share/terminfo/r/rxvt
/usr/share/terminfo/r/rxvt-basic

then ran /usr/share/terminfo/r/rxvt with and without the options, but I recieved a permission denied error even while running as su-. Weird.

Those things aren't the program judging from the location so no one has execute permissions (check the file permissions with ls -l to see this). rxvt is probably not installed. But what's this got to do with your bash_profile?

Alright to some up I checked out a site on scripting and found out what my problem was. This is a copy of my .bash_profile with both alias' returning errors.

#.bash_profile

# Get the aliases and functions
if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then
. ~/.bashrc
fi

# User specific environment and startup programs

PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin:/usr/sbin

alias l='ls -l'
alias today='date+"%A,%B%-d,%Y"'

export PATH
unset USERNAME

#end of file.

Now this is a copy of .bash_profile with the changes I made to allow the alias to function.

# .bash_profile

# Get the aliases and functions
if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then
. ~/.bashrc
fi

alias l='ls -l'
alias today='date+"%A,%B%-d,%Y"'

# User specific environment and startup programs

PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin:/usr/sbin


export PATH
unset USERNAME

#end of file.

Those scripting gurus out there can see what I did wrong. For those of us less fortunate, the alias commands must be put below the if - fi function.