Typically we interact with the Linux operating system through what is referred to as a shell interpreter. A common interpreter is the Bourne Again Shell, which people call by the catchy name of bash ...

I'm trying to get a number of variables setup on login and have put them in this file.<P>The user uses bash as it's default shell but .bash_profile dosn't seem to run on login.<P>What am I missing ...

You probably don't have one, you probably want to edit .bash_profile but I believe bash honors the .profile as well. Either way they go in the root of your home directory.

For many users who get started with the command line in Linux, there’s a good chance they’re using Bourne Again Shell, or Bash. Bash is the default shell on Mac OS X, and Windows users can use Bash ...