How to reload .bash_profile from the command line

Overview

The .bash_profile is one of the startup files used by bash shell to set up the shell configuration.

In some systems, we may not find the file .bash_profile. In such cases, the shell looks for the file .profile.

We can also create the file .bash_profile and define functions or environment variables in it.

We can use the syntax below to reload the .bash_profile.

Let's look at an example of this.

Example

Explanation

In the code snippet above:

• Line 5: We create a file .bash_profile since it is not available in this system.
• Lines 8–12: We create an environment variable and a few echo statements in the .bash_profile file.
• Line 15: We reload the .bash_profile file using the command . ~/.bash_profile.

After executing the terminal, we can see that the bash profile is reloaded. We can use echo $URL to print the environment variable value that we defined in the .bash_profile file.