.bashrc

[dayananda.ms]

Hi...
Can anyone tell me what exactly .bashrc means??? what is the difference b/w .bashrc and .bash_profile???
I came know that .bash_profile will .bashrc, but why is it that???

[b2bwild]

~/.bashrc
The individual per-interactive-shell startup file

When an interactive shell that is not a login shell is started, bash
reads and executes commands from ~/.bashrc, if that file exists. This
may be inhibited by using the --norc option. The --rcfile file option
will force bash to read and execute commands from file instead of
~/.bashrc.

~/.bash_profile
The personal initialization file, executed for login shells

When bash is invoked as an interactive login shell, or as a non-inter-
active shell with the --login option, it first reads and executes com-
mands from the file /etc/profile, if that file exists. After reading
that file, it looks for ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login, and ~/.profile,
in that order, and reads and executes commands from the first one that
exists and is readable. The --noprofile option may be used when the
shell is started to inhibit this behavior.