Still, they're not read with every new interactive shell. They're read only with login shells. From the manual: > When bash is invoked as an interactive login

Still, they're not read with every new interactive shell. They're read only with login shells. From the manual: > When bash is invoked as an interactive login shell, or as a non-interactive shell with the --login option, it first reads and executes commands from the file /etc/profile, if that file exists. After reading that file, it looks for ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login, > When an interactive shell that is not a login shell is started, bash reads and executes commands from ~/.bashrc So, this is wrong: > bashrc refers to something that runs in each and every new shell Because .bashrc doesn't run when you execute a shell script, and doesn't run when you use `bash -c`. And this is wrong: > profile refers to something that runs only in interactive shells Because it does run in non-interactive shells when they're login shells, and because it implies that it runs in every interactive shell, which it doesn't. It only runs in login shells.