Hi, Using the /bin/bash shell and a ~/.profile with the following permissions -rw-r--r-- 1 papadopo papadopo 492 Jan 21 11:40 .profile I get the following error message and ~/.profile is not executed bash: /home/papadopo/.profile: Permission denied I do have a .bash_profile file as well -rw-r--r-- 1 papadopo papadopo 230 Jan 13 23:27 .bash_profile Running chmod +x ~/.profile fixes the problem. However this is not needed for /etc/profile -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 567 Jun 11 2000 /etc/profile This is unconsistent and the man page does not mention it 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, and ~/.profile, in that order, and reads and executes commands from the first one that exists and is readable.
Aaargh, forget it! This happens to an account which has a non-default broken ~/.bashrc which is executed by ~/.profile and tries to execute ~/.profile again! Sorry about that.