[russjones]

I ran an eBPF program called opensnoop [1] to capture what files were opened during login to a system and then re-launching bash. Looks like both are read during initial login but only .bashrc for non-login shells. Output is below.

  24435  bash                3   0 /etc/profile
  24435  bash                3   0 /etc/profile.d/
  24435  bash                3   0 /etc/profile.d/256term.sh
  24435  bash                3   0 /etc/profile.d/colorgrep.sh
  24435  bash                3   0 /etc/profile.d/colorls.sh
  24435  bash                3   0 /etc/profile.d/lang.sh
  24435  bash                3   0 /etc/profile.d/less.sh
  24435  bash                3   0 /etc/profile.d/which2.sh
  24435  bash                3   0 /etc/profile.d/sh.local
  24435  bash                3   0 /home/centos/.bash_profile
  24435  bash                3   0 /home/centos/.bashrc
  24435  bash                3   0 /etc/bashrc

  24736  bash                3   0 /home/centos/.bashrc
  24736  bash                3   0 /etc/bashrc
  24736  bash                3   0 /etc/profile.d/
  24736  bash                3   0 /etc/profile.d/256term.sh
  24736  bash                3   0 /etc/profile.d/colorgrep.sh
  24736  bash                3   0 /etc/profile.d/colorls.sh
  24736  bash                3   0 /etc/profile.d/lang.sh
  24736  bash                3   0 /etc/profile.d/less.sh
  24736  bash                3   0 /etc/profile.d/which2.sh

[1] http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2014-07-25/opensnoop-for-li...

[remram]

Be careful that some of those files explicitly include others. For example my (default) ~/.profile includes ~/.bashrc, my ~/.bash_profile includes ~/.profile, /etc/profile includes /etc/bash.bashrc...

So your capture here doesn't show only the files that bash itself decided to load. You also won't see the fallback files (e.g. bash will open .profile if .bash_profile doesn't exist).