Comment 2 for bug 1860109

The BUG appears to be caused when the NCBI environment variable is undefined. Setting NCBI to the installed location of the default config file under Ubuntu fixes the problem:

> ajt@beluga:~$ export NCBI=/etc/ncbi
> ajt@beluga:~$ strace blastn |& fgrep .ncbirc
> stat("./.ncbirc", 0x7ffc01d0e2c0) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
> stat("/home/ajt/.ncbirc", 0x7ffc01d0e2c0) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
> stat("/etc/ncbi/.ncbirc", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=1229, ...}) = 0
> stat("/etc/ncbi/.ncbirc", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=1229, ...}) = 0
> stat("/etc/ncbi/.ncbirc", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=1229, ...}) = 0
> lstat("/etc/ncbi/.ncbirc", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=1229, ...}) = 0
> openat(AT_FDCWD, "/etc/ncbi/.ncbirc", O_RDONLY) = 3
> stat("./.ncbirc", 0x7ffc01d0eae0) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
> stat("/home/ajt/.ncbirc", 0x7ffc01d0eae0) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
> stat("/etc/ncbi/.ncbirc", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=1229, ...}) = 0
This behaviour is consistent to what NCBI describe:

> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK279695/

If the NCBI variable is unset, "blastn" looks for "/etc/.ncbirc". However, the default location the config file is installed to under Ubuntu is "/etc/ncbi/.ncbirc".