Terminal: Where is the shell start-up file?

Question

I\'m following a tutorial called Starting a Django 1.4 Project the Right Way, which gives directions on how to use virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper, among other things.

Answer 1

If you use bash, it usually means ~/.bash_profile.

In Terminal and iTerm new shells are login shells by default, so ~/.bashrc is not read at all. If instructions written for some other platform tell you to add something to .bashrc, you often have to add it to .bash_profile instead.

If both ~/.profile and ~/.bash_profile exist, only .bash_profile is read. .profile is also read by other shells, but many of the things you'd add to .bash_profile wouldn't work with them.

From /usr/share/doc/bash/bash.html:

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 commands from the first one that exists and is readable.

[...]

When an interactive shell that is not a login shell is started, bash reads and executes commands from ~/.bashrc, if that file exists.