Question

in “Bash Guide for Beginners”, it’s said:

Bash is the GNU shell, compatible with the Bourne shell and incorporating many useful features from other shells. When the shell is started, it reads its configuration files. The most important are:

/etc/profile

~/.bash_profile

~/.bashrc

however, in my ubuntu 11.10,
– there’s no “~/.bash_profile”: file explorer does not show it, and “ls -l ~/.bash_profile” says “No Such file or directory”
– there are “/etc/profile” and “~/.bashrc”, but they don’t show up in file explorer, only “ls -l /etc/profile” and “ls -l /.bashrc” shows the result.

is there something missing during my installation?

Answer 1

No, it’s fine if those files aren’t there, they’ll just be ignored. To get a complete list of what’s loaded and in what order, run man bash and check the section on INVOCATION (use “/” and type in INVOCATION to search)

Edit: saving @athos a man bash call 😉

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, in that order, and reads and executes com‐
mands from the first one that exists and is readable. The –noprofile option may be used when the shell is started to inhibit this behavior.

When a login shell exits, bash reads and executes commands from the file ~/.bash_logout, if it exists.

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. This
may be inhibited by using the –norc option. The –rcfile file option will force bash to read and execute commands from file instead of /etc/bash.bashrc and
~/.bashrc.