What can cause my .profile file to not be loaded when a new terminal shell is initialized?

Question

There are no errors in xsession and I don't have a .bash_login or .bash_profile file, so I'm 100% certain neither of those is loaded and thus cancels .profile loading.

When I rename the .profile to .bash_profile and open a new terminal window, it still doesn't load. Everything in the file works (aliases and PATH exports) when I load it manually via ". ~/.profile", but it won't load automatically.

Solution

Looks like this was answered before. You have to be aware of the loading priorities of the files.

[EDIT]

You Have two options:

1. (Not Recommended) Get your terminal to start as a login shell:
   • open a terminal
   • Go to Edit -> Profile Preferences -> Title and Command
   • activate the "Run Command as a login shell" checkbox This way your .profile is read. But it also messes up the default loading behavior so I would recommend:
2. Edit or create ~/.bashrc!

Look here for a good explanation about the difference between .bashrc and .bash_profile

Comments

[Swader]

Like I said, the other files do not exist. I only have one profile file, and that's .profile, and even renaming it to .bash_profile does not help. It never even tries to get loaded.

[mrcktz]

see my edit above, hope it helps

[nyg]

I think the proper way to load ~/.profile is to do so in ~/.xsessionrc. See this answer and my comment: askubuntu.com/a/1281956.