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I am using iTerm in Mac OS X 10.6. It seems when I open iTerm, neither .bashrc nor .bash_profile is sourced. I can tell because the aliases defined in .bashrc are not set. How to fix?

1
  • 3
    What's happening is ~/.bash_profile is being invoked by bash first, which is short circuiting the instructions you have in ~/.bashrc. This problem can happen unexpectedly if a rogue program adds some instructions to your ~/.bash_profile when previously the file didn't exist, and you had placed all your bash commands in ~/.bashrc. The solution is to either delete your ~/.bash_profile, or to have ~/.bash_profile source your ~/.bashrc. This can be performed by adding the command: source ~/.bashrc to the end of your ~/.bash_profile and restarting the terminal. Aug 27, 2017 at 15:16

14 Answers 14

62

Bash will source EITHER .bash_profile or .bashrc, depending upon how it is called. If it is a login shell, Bash looks for ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login, or ~/.profile, in that order, and sources the first one it finds (and only that one). If it is not a login shell but is interactive (like most terminal sessions), Bash will source ~/.bashrc.

Likely, iTerm is looking for ~/.bashrc. If it's configured to start as a login shell, it will look for ~/.bash_profile. It's almost certainly an error within the config file rather than that the shell is not sourcing it.

I would put a line at the beginning of each file. At the top of ~/.bash_profile:

export BASH_CONF="bash_profile"

And at the top of ~/.bashrc:

export BASH_CONF="bashrc"

Then, open a new iTerm and type

$ echo $BASH_CONF

That should confirm the file is being sourced and you can look into the syntax of the file.

6
  • 3
    Setting a different environment variable for each source file allows for more information, that is, if more than one file is sourced, you'll know it, nost just the last one (if not the order sourced.)
    – kmarsh
    Nov 23, 2015 at 18:47
  • This still doesn't load the .bashrc file. I had to add source ~/.bashrc to my iTerm and Terminal Preferences. btw I'm using Mac OS X 10.9.5.
    – Giant Elk
    May 26, 2016 at 1:06
  • I just added a .profile file and that automatically works on OS X 10.9.5 without messing in your terminal preferences.
    – Giant Elk
    May 26, 2016 at 1:11
  • 2
    I found out it is a login shell by going to preferences -> profiles -> general and login shell is selected under command. Valid on MacOS El Capitan and iTerm2 3.0.14
    – Aditya
    Mar 2, 2017 at 17:37
  • The solution here did not work for me, but I found a solution. In the beginning, there was no bashrc and no bash_profile. The answer here proposes to create a bashrc. Instead of creating a bashrc file I created a bash_profile, and it worked. Now I need to understand why the bashrc was not executed and the bash_profile yes.
    – desmond13
    Aug 17, 2018 at 15:17
95

In iTerm2, none of these solutions worked for me. I was able to get it to properly read my .bashrc file by adding the command

source ~/.bashrc 

to the Send text at start: field in Settings/General for my iTerm profile.

enter image description here

8
  • What happened when you did what the accepted answer suggests? No output?
    – Daniel Beck
    Jun 13, 2012 at 18:15
  • 1
    Right. I got no output, and iTerm 2 just loaded the default bash shell with none of my aliases. Jun 13, 2012 at 18:25
  • That answer was broken until just now -- the second snippet was supposed to go into ~/.bashrc. Edited it.
    – Daniel Beck
    Jun 16, 2012 at 6:13
  • I use ZSH and was having the same issue. Except that none of my config file existed in the first place and had to be created. I used this answer and set the "Send text at start" however, when i restarted ZSH created it's .zsh and overwrote my file, i was able to remove the "Send text at start" and add my configs to the newly generated file. Not sure if this helps anyone
    – Arnolio
    Dec 8, 2016 at 16:23
  • 1
    +1 works like a charm. May add also source ~/.bashrc && source ~/.bash_profile Sep 13, 2017 at 19:06
36

I just wonder do you really use Bash? May be you can use echo $SHELL, it is quite possible that you are using zsh, have you installed on-my-zh?

Acutually I encounter the same problem as you, I fix it by configuring ~/.zshrc instead either ~/.bash_profile for login shell or ~/.bashrc for non-login shell.

Maybe you can have a try

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  • 1
    Interesting suggestion, although this question is 3 years old and has an accepted answer.
    – Tyson
    Dec 2, 2014 at 13:55
  • See this link to also fix the key bindings like Home/Pos1 and End keys.
    – Daniel W.
    Dec 2, 2019 at 13:11
12

On my 10.6 machine ~/.profile is sourced. So a source .bashrc entry in ~/.profile should do the job.

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  • Worked for me on Mac OS El Capitan.
    – user674669
    Jun 15, 2016 at 20:56
  • My experience says you do not want to source one .bashx file from another, they are separate for a reason :) If you are doing that, then something is wrong Feb 20, 2017 at 21:55
  • @AlexanderMills The reason these files exist is because Mac ripped them straight outta Unix. There's no reason they all shouldn't be loaded for a user. Feb 7, 2019 at 21:35
  • you can get circular calls if they load each other, is the problem, best way to avoid that is to flip a boolean with an env var and only load the other files if the boolean is not set. Feb 7, 2019 at 22:03
9

Easy fix.

1. Open your ~/.zshrc file

2. Add the following line at the end of the file.

source ~/.bash_profile
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  • 1
    Brilliant! That did it for me. It never occurred to me that zsh was getting in the way after I installed Oh-my-zh. Apr 19, 2018 at 14:34
  • Brilliant! None of the other solutions above worked for me.
    – John Jiang
    Oct 12, 2021 at 2:28
6

On my 10.9 machine ~/.bash_profile is sourced. So a source .bashrc entry in ~/.bash_profile should do the job.

1

Put your alias definitions in the bash profile file, you have to create the file but it will be sourced automatically. I create a separate file called alias.configuration and source it in .bash_profile just because I have another user defined and want to have the same alias set.

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    Actually neither .bashrc nor .bash_profile are sourced.
    – Computist
    Aug 7, 2011 at 6:02
1

Add

set -x

to the beginning of /etc/profile. This gives you a line-by-line account of everything that gets executed when bash starts up, including files sourced from within /etc/profile, ~/.bash_profile, etc. It's a bit daunting if you don't understand bash scripting very well, but you may be able to see if there is an error in a start-up file, and the output will be useful for someone proficient in bash to help you locate your problem.

You can remove the set -x line when you're finished troubleshooting.

1

On 10.10 and iTerm2 2.0, customized profile

  • .bash_rc should work.
  • .bash_profile, try "/bin/bash --login" instead of "/bin/bash"
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  • I voted up this answer because it seems to be the only one acknowledging that in OS X,at some point, bash would source ".bash_rc" instead of ".bashrc" . I only came here because I was trying to find out why (and I still don't know). Feb 2, 2016 at 18:09
1

Since iTerm2 has "Login Shell" under Preference > Profiles > General > Command, it will look for ~/.bash_profile before ~/.bashrc.

You need to add this to ~/bash_profile:

. ~/.bashrc

enter image description here

0

In iTerm2, ensure you're using "login shell" instead of a custom command including "login", which doesn't do what you expect.

1
  • What does iTerm2 command actually do?
    – studgeek
    Apr 9, 2016 at 21:24
0

Make the following change and iTerm will source bashrc

iTerm > Preferences > General > [x] Command: /bin/bash

0

Problem can be fixed by adding below line into /etc/bashrc

[ -r "$HOME/.bashrc" ] && . "$HOME/.bashrc"

-1

I combined couple solutions together to work it like expected.

.bash_profile source and run on zsh.

Preferences -> Profiles -> General .

Select Command under Command .
And add in the text box /bin/bash --login .

Then in .bash_profile add line /bin/zsh --login

That's it.

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  • (1) What? (2) If you are having bash always run zsh, that is not what anybody expects. Mar 5, 2018 at 5:56
  • If I set /bin/bash --login, it doesn't provide any features of zsh. Then If I change it to loginshell in preference, it doesn't read .bash_profile. Everytime I have to run source ~/.bash_profile manually. @Scott After doing the above things, I have zsh in the required way. Mar 5, 2018 at 8:07
  • (1) My point is that zsh might be what you desire, but it is not required or asked for by this question, which is tagged [bash] and doesn’t say anything about zsh.  (2) If you define aliases and shell functions and set variables (without exporting them) in your .bashrc and/or .bash_profile, are they available to you in your zsh shell? Mar 5, 2018 at 15:32

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