Should i use .bash_profile or .bashrc to put bash initialization stuff in? It seems that .bash_profile is used when you first login, and .bashrc is used every other time (like in xterm for example). Is it supposed to be like this?

There is a similar thread at

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=27095

where I posted some stuff - what makes the difference is whether or not your shell is a login shell. That used to have a well-defined meaning in the days of terminals; you logged in and that was the login shell. With Xwindows, that is more fuzzy -- xterm -ls gives you a login shell, for example.

But there is a reason behind this. Since .bash_profile is executed (in principle) only once, that is the place where you can append to the system-preset path, for example. If you did that in .bashrc, your path would grow with each level of shell invocation. You would set the prompt, alias definitions, in general define stuff that is not inherited by a subshell.

mlp