> 'interactive' is when called with -i flag (which sshd does when reached by > ssh with no command passed, i.e if you do 'ssh ls' it should not call > bashr

> 'interactive' is when called with -i flag (which sshd does when reached by > ssh with no command passed, i.e if you do 'ssh ls' it should not call > bashrc, but should call bash_profile) Do you mean that an interactive shell should load .bash_profile? Because the bash man page says: "When an interactive shell that is not a login shell is started, bash reads and executes commands from ~/.bashrc". Re. ssh, the bash man page says (at least on my system, with bash 4.2.37): "Bash attempts to determine when it is being run with its standard input connected to a network connection, as when executed by the remote shell daemon, usually rshd, or the secure shell daemon sshd. If bash determines it is being run in this fashion, it reads and executes commands from ~/.bashrc". That last quote from the bash man page contradict my own experiments. Logging into my OS X system with ssh loads .profile, not .bashrc. The same is true logging into my Fedora 17 system with ssh. Perhaps sshd uses --login instead of -i (or, on my systems, happens to be configured in that way). Running a command via ssh ("ssh hostname somecommand") loads nothing when the remote system is OS X, and loads .bashrc when the remote system is Fedora 17. All in all, I will respectfully disagree that "there is no madness". Normally I completely relate to the RTFM sentiment, and I have spent plenty of time in the bash manual myself. I remain unconvinced that there is a better solution than putting everything into .bashrc (with the $- guard around stuff specific to interactive shells) and doing nothing in .profile other than unconditionally sourcing .bashrc. > [[ $- == *i* ]] Thanks for the sane test syntax: It's much clearer than my ugly mess of almost every symbol character I could find. :-)