[brbsix]

These rules of thumb are useful, but in the real-world I find the use of startup files to be very inconsistent across different platforms. Oftentimes I someone will override the default behavior, sourcing files in different conditions or order than you would expect. There's really no substitute to reading all the startup files in /etc and ~. Sometimes it's even necessary to inspect the binary itself when you find that a shell has been compiled with non-standard paths.