Re: About win-bash customized environment

[James Youngman]

On Sat, Sep 20, 2008 at 12:08 PM, Softeam <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hello from Paris,
>
> Since I downloaded and watched the "Revolution OS" documentary yesterday I 
> have decided to install win-bash on my computer.
>
> I noticed that win-bash doesn't read .bash_profile, .profile, etc. 
> customization files from the working directory at login - forcing me to 
> source them at each login.
>
> Am I doing something wrong ?

This is the GNU coreutils mailng list.  Coreutils does not include the
Bash shell, so we're not in much of a position to help with your
problem (that is, it's not our software you are using).

You could try asking for help on a Bash-related mailing list, but then
on the other hand your problem looks Windows-specific.   I think you
might have better luck asking for help from the win-bash folks.
Fortunately, their homepage includes a link to the bug-reporting
address: http://win-bash.sourceforge.net/ (I found this with a very
simple web search).

Stepping back for a second though, the great thing about the Unix
shell (and Bash as an example of it) is that it's easy to plug lots of
powerful tools together.   If you only have Bash installed on your
system, all those great tools are missing.  While you can still do
useful things with Bash in such an environment, it's quite limiting.

I suggest that you might find it useful to have all those other tools,
too.   A great way to do this would be to use GNU/Linux.  But this is
not always feasible (perhaps you have just one computer which needs to
run Windows and cannot run any kind of virtual machine).   A great
alternative for this situation is Cygwin, which is a full environment
of Unix-like tools that runs on various versions of Windows.  For more
information, please see
http://www.cygwin.com/.   As an added bonus, you will see that Cygwin
includes a much more recent version of the Bash shell.

Thanks,
James.