It is not clear to me what exactly you want to do, nor which ~/.bashrc
you’re talking about. You seem to be hinting at a connection over ssh
, and therefore I have no idea where you have defined those variables, and/or whether you expect them to also be defined on the remote machine.
This is what the manual has to say about it…
Bash Startup Files (Bash Reference Manual)
6.2 Bash Startup Files
This section describes how Bash executes its startup files. If any of the files exist but cannot be read, Bash reports an error. Tildes are expanded in filenames as described above under Tilde Expansion (see Tilde Expansion).
Interactive shells are described in Interactive Shells.
Invoked as an interactive login shell, or with --login
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. The --noprofile
option may be used when the shell is started to inhibit this behavior.
When an interactive login shell exits, or a non-interactive login shell executes the exit
builtin command, Bash reads and executes commands from the file ~/.bash_logout
, if it exists.
Invoked as an interactive non-login shell
When an interactive shell that is not a login shell is started, Bash reads and executes commands from ~/.bashrc
, if that file exists. This may be inhibited by using the --norc
option. The --rcfile
file option will force Bash to read and execute commands from file instead of ~/.bashrc
.
So, typically, your ~/.bash_profile
contains the line
if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then . ~/.bashrc; fi
after (or before) any login-specific initializations.
Invoked non-interactively
When Bash is started non-interactively, to run a shell script, for example, it looks for the variable BASH_ENV
in the environment, expands its value if it appears there, and uses the expanded value as the name of a file to read and execute. Bash behaves as if the following command were executed:
if [ -n "$BASH_ENV" ]; then . "$BASH_ENV"; fi
but the value of the PATH
variable is not used to search for the filename.
As noted above, if a non-interactive shell is invoked with the --login
option, Bash attempts to read and execute commands from the login shell startup files.
[…]
Invoked by remote shell daemon
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
, if that file exists and is readable. It will not do this if invoked as sh
. The --norc
option may be used to inhibit this behavior, and the --rcfile
option may be used to force another file to be read, but neither rshd
nor sshd
generally invoke the shell with those options or allow them to be specified.
Given that I don’t know what exactly you’re trying to do, I hope that the above offers some clarity.