log on not reading user's .bashrc

I brought up a new linux OS while retaining the home partition from the old one. When I mounted this home partition and created the same user accounts, the users could not access their old home directories because their user numbers had changed. I probably should have just editted the /etc/groups and /etc/passwd entries. But I tried something else instead: I used chown -R on each of the home directories to the user. That fixed the access problem.

But a new problem has emerged. When a normal user logs on, his .bashrc file is not parsed. Does anyone have any idea what I've hosed up here?

Thanks.
-Jeff

Are you talking Red Hat? If so, make sure this is at the bottom:

# Source global definitions
if [ -f /etc/bashrc ]; then
	. /etc/bashrc
fi

Put it at the bottom of what? The user's ~/.bashrc? But that file isn't being read. I think the global /etc/bashrc is.

Its a gentoo system.

Did you try doing usermod -s bash for each user? Perhaps their shell isn't set.

code:-------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Source global definitions
if [ -f /etc/bashrc ]; then
. /etc/bashrc
fi
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

That should be at the end of your .bash_profile

.bash_profile in your home directory is what sources the .bashrc

Are the permissions on your .bash_profile and .bashrc correct?

Should be 644

chmod 644 .bash_profile

chmod 644 .bashrc

HTH

abyss - I know this is an old thread, but your response helped me and I've been working on the bashrc file not loading for a couple days.

I am a bit curious though, once I added the .bash_profile with the lines you mentioned, my user bashrc was loaded just fine. However before I did that (and still), if I go su it loads up the .bashrc file and there is no .bash_profile for the root account.

Why is this?

The .bashrc file is only sourced on non-login shells (like when you do su -- I believe "su -" opens a login shell). The .bash_profule script is sourced on login shells, so many people (including me) just have .bash_profile source .bashrc so they get the same environment regardless of whether the shell is a login or non-login shell.

That is what I believe I did, finally. At least with my user account. I created a .bash_profile under the ~/ directory and added the following lines to it:

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

However, now when I boot up and try to log on under my normal account, I get the following error message:

Cannot execute bash: No such file or directory.

This forces me to login with the root account.

I'm not sure how this happened. It may have been when I edited the permissions for my user .bash_profile or .bashrc, but I can't be sure.

Permissions:

131455 -rw-r--r-- 1 aaron users 73 2010-05-15 13:14 /home/aaron/.bash_profile
131451 -rw-r--r-- 1 aaron users 2.0K 2010-05-14 23:49 /home/aaron/.bashrc
279722 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2.0K 2010-05-14 23:48 /root/.bashrc

(I do not have a .bash_profile under root)

Do you have any ideas what may have gone wrong here and/or how to fix it?

Thanks!

SOLVED.

The issue was in my /etc/passwd file. Somehow my user got changed to just :bash instead of :/bin/bash.

Fixing this corrected the issue. Thank you for the efforts!