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I have a few separate programs installed, some of which require me to go into my GUI terminal settings and enable/disable the "Run command as a login shell" option to get either working.

Example:

I installed Ruby on Rails. Unfortunately I have to go into the terminal options and enable "Run command as login shell" for it to be in my PATH.

This wasn't too much of an issue up until I installed sexy-bash-prompt, which works only if the option is disabled.

So my question is essentially: what does "Run command as login shell" do? Is there a way to get the things that run when it's disabled to run when you do run as login shell?

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Assuming that your shell is Bash (the default in Ubuntu), these are the differences:

  • When running as a login shell, Bash will read ~/.bash_profile (or, if that doesn't exist, ~/.profile) on startup. In some cases, this file reads ~/.bashrc as well.

  • When running as a non-login shell, Bash will read ~/.bashrc.

So, why do you see different behaviors when running as a login/non-login shell? Because your .bash_profile/.profile is doing different things than your .bashrc.

The solution I would recommend in your case is to copy the customizations made to .bash_profile/.profile, paste them into .bashrc and disable "Run command as a login shell".

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  • Ahh ok. I figured it had to do with what login profile it read (source'ing .bashrc fixes some of the issues I had). I'll give that a go, sorry for the horribly written question.
    – AlbertEngelB
    Aug 26, 2013 at 15:06
  • Thanks for the concise explanation. It is not uncommon to see people just keep their customizations in .bashrc and have .bash_profile to source .bashrc. Login specific customizations should be kept in .bash_profile only.
    – MichaelZ
    Apr 15, 2015 at 13:44
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    Why not just source .bashrc into .bash_profile and leave the login shell on? Is that feasible?
    – Kokozaurus
    Jun 7, 2016 at 17:12

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