`.profile` appears to not be loaded by the shell

[chriskilding]

`.profile` appears to not be loaded by the shell

[Marukesu]

.profile are loaded by bash only in login shells. as written in the bash's man page:

When bash is invoked as an interactive login shell, or as a non-interactive shell with
the --login option, it first reads and executes commands from the file /etc/profile, if
that file exists. After reading that file, it looks for ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login,
and ~/.profile
...
When an interactive shell that is not a login shell is started, bash reads and executes
commands from /etc/bash.bashrc and ~/.bashrc, if these files exist.

So, if you want .profile to be loaded in a non-login shell (like the ones launched by terminal) you will need to include it from the .bashrc file.

[chriskilding]

Thanks for clarifying that!

By way of context, I encountered this when I was trying to use Linuxbrew. This adds eval "$(/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/bin/brew shellenv)" to the .profile. As you mentioned this is indeed not loaded just by opening a new Terminal tab, so brew was not available on the PATH to begin with. I then restarted Elementary, and brew did become available after that.

I don't know why something in the .profile would get loaded if you restart the machine, after all the Elementary Terminal still provides non-login interactive shells as you mentioned. But whatever the reason, this appears to fix Linuxbrew.