I've searched for a couple of hours on the Internet, but can't seem to find the answer to this... I'm running SUSE 9.2 (first ever Linux system), and am far enough along that I want to customize a few things: alter the path for individual users, start a couple of applications on login, etc, etc.

When a user logs into the system, two personal initialization files are called: .bashrc and .profile. This is no surprise. But neither .bash_profile nor .bash_login seems to be called. At least, if I modify PATH in these files, the modifications never take effect.

My problem is this: .bashrc is called three times, and .profile is called twice. This means that whatever initialization I put into these files is repeated. For aliases and the like, this doesn't matter. But for PATH, starting apps, and other things, it matters a lot.

Two possible solutions, but I don't know how to do either:

- prevent multiple invocations of these files

- find some other file (bash_profile, bash_login) that is only called once. But - as mentioned above - these currently seem *never* to be called.

Any help appreciated...

Brad

according to "man bash", bash_login is only run if you log into your system using a bash login screen. My guess is that you are using KDE or GNOME to do the login. You can try their login files.

KDE: ~/.kde/Autostart/kde_start.sh

and the raeson that .bachrc seems to be called many times is probably that it is called everytime a terminal is started.

Hi,

Thanks for the reply. Yes, I am using KDE. And it does seem likely that the multiple executions of .bashrc are because of KDE starting things. But - as I understand the documentation, ".profile" is really only supposed to be executed once, not twice - and this should not be affected by whatever KDE is up to in its initializaiton process.

Putting things in the KDE-startup files may be a solution, but surely it is not the right one. When one logs into the system, this is (as I understand it) before the window manager has started. I would think that one ought to set PATH, and similar things, at that level - independent of KDE or any other window manager.

Cheers,

Brad