Linux – /etc/profile not being sourced at login

bashlinux

I'm having a bit of an issue: Neither of my /etc/profile or /etc/environment are getting sourced at login!

i.e: After boot, the global variables I've got set in /etc/profile (and /etc/profile.d/*.sh consequently) or /etc/environment are not recognized neither by other GUI apps nor by bash on terminal.

Please note that I'm running Linux Mint 17 the Cinnamon edition, which, by default, does source the /etc/profile file.

File permissions are -rw-r--r-- 1 root root for all of the files in question.

What could be the problem?

Best Answer

Ran into this with Debian Jessie + Cinnamon + lightdm.

Going backto wheezy, I find that /etc/profile and ~/.profile gets sourced by /etc/gdm/Xsession. This logic appears to be totally missing in "this" jessie setup. So I grabbed this code and copied to a new file in jessie:

/etc/X11/Xsession.d/70fix_lightdm_gpv

graeme@jessie:~/Desktop$ cat /etc/X11/Xsession.d/70fix_lightdm_gpv

# GPV: 2-May-2015, lightdm + cinnamon forgets to source ANY profiles!!

# First read /etc/profile and .profile
test -f /etc/profile && . /etc/profile
test -f "$HOME/.profile" && . "$HOME/.profile"
# Second read /etc/xprofile and .xprofile for X specific setup
test -f /etc/xprofile && . /etc/xprofile
test -f "$HOME/.xprofile" && . "$HOME/.xprofile"

# Local Variables:
# mode: shell-script
# sh-indentation: 2
# indent-tabs-mode: nil
# End:

# vim:set ai et sts=2 sw=2 tw=80:

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set -x somewhere in the root file (the one requiring all other files) should work. Alternatively, introduce something like [[ !-z "$DEBUG" ]] && set -x in each file, and call with DEBUG=1 script.sh.

Linux – Where should I export an environment variable so that all combinations of bash/dash, interactive/non-interactive, login/non-login, will pick it up

Shell invocation is a bit of a complicated thing. The bash and dash man pages has INVOCATION sections about this.

In summary they says (there is more detail in the man page, you should read it):

When bash is                   | it reads
-------------------------------|----------
login shell                    | /etc/profile and then the first of ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login or ~/.profile that exists.
                               |
interactive non-login shell    | /etc/bash.bashrc then ~/.bashrc
                               |
non-interactive shell          | The contents of $BASH_ENV (if it exists)
                               |
interactive (as "sh")          | The contents of $ENV (if it exists)

When dash is                   | it reads
-------------------------------|---------
login shell                    | /etc/profile then .profile
                               |
interactive shell              | The contents of ENV (it it exists, can be set in .profile as well as in initial environment)

I don't know about other shells offhand as I never use any of them. Your best bet might be to set a couple environment variables to point at the common location script and manually source that (when appropriate) in the couple of cases that doesn't cover.

Best Answer

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Linux – How to make “bash -x” (debug mode) recurse into sourced scripts

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