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I keep finding suggestions to put things in my .bashrc or .bash_profile files, located conveniently in my home directory. Problem is, neither of them are there.
And yes, I did ls -a, I'm not THAT much of a newbie.... I've got .bash_history, and .kderc, and other such goodies, but not those two bash config files.
Is this an oddity of Slackware (ie they are stored somewhere else) or do they simply not exist until I create them? If I do create them, what should they contain? Are they shell scripts? Do I make them executable?
Also, if running slackware, beware that by default new users are often given /bin/sh for their shell instead of /bin/bash. /bin/sh is just a symlink to /bin/bash (or vice versa), but if bash is invoked as sh it will behave slightly differently, including not reading the .bash_* startup files. You should chsh your shell to bash. I always do when running slackware. The syntax is chsh -s /bin/bash. You can see how bash has been invoked by typing echo $SHELL on the command prompt (to see if this in necessary).
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