[skywhopper]

Bash is broken in this regard, having no way to reliably enforce a consistent baseline across the four possible startup modes except by having all the possible startup files explicitly call some shared source. Glad to see zsh has addressed this.

[hyperion2010]

My first distro was Gentoo which has engineered around the problems in bash. Needless to say I didn't learn that they had engineered around it until I went to other distros and learned that the default behavior is not user friendly (to say the least). The complete inconsistency of implementations also means that searching and reading forums can often be counterproductive.