gnome-terminal not started as an "interactive shell"

[Reuben Firmin]

Binary package hint: gnome-terminal

The bash started by gnome-terminal (invoked from the Gnome menu) didn't know it was supposed to be an interactive shell. This means that a user's .bash_profile is not sourced.

So I edited the gnome-terminal applet to add the option --command="bash --login", which made .bash_profile start to work.

[Andreas Braml (a-strich-b)]

As far as my knowledge goes, this is not a bug, but exactly what bash (or any shell in an X terminal emulator) is supposed to do. .bash_profile is only sourced on login, not when starting a new shell. To influence the environment of interactive shell sessions, use .bashrc

[Reuben Firmin (reubenf)]

Ah.

But konsole (in KDE) *does* have the contents of .bash_profile successfully picked up. So either gnome-terminal is not picking up the environment variables set at login, or gnome isn't sourcing .bash_profile at login.

The .bashrc is ubuntu is complicated and (at least was) partially buggy. Users should use .bash_profile for their own settings, so it's important that it work properly.

[Andreas Braml (a-strich-b)]

You should be able to check if the Gnome session picks up .bash_profile by starting an xterm, I guess. Could you please try and report back?

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Closing this bug report as no further information has been provided. Please feel free to reopen this bug if you can provide the information asked for. Thanks!.

[Reuben Firmin (reubenf)]

Come on guys, it's an easy bug to verify, and it's serious. Closing it doing nobody a favor. I don't use GNOME on a regular basis, so I can't verify for you.