What is the .bashrc file?

Actually, it's specifically that reads (and ). There are lots of different shells. The bash man page (by Brian Fox and Chet Ramey; also info page "Bash Startup Files") is the authoritative reference: When an interactive shell that is not a login shell is started, bash reads and executes commands from , if that file exists. This may be inhibited by using the option. The file option will force bash to read and execute commands from file instead of . When bash is started non-interactively, to run …