Why doesn Eterm read my shell profile/rc files (.bashrc, .bash_profile, etc.)?
Okay, let me make this very, very clear right off the bat. Eterm DOES NOT read any shell profile/rc file for any shell. Ever. Never has, never will. Neither does any other terminal program. You are confused. When Eterm starts up, it is provided with the environment of its parent process, be it your window manager, your X startup file, your panel/launcher application, or whatever. Eterm, in turn, spawns a subprocess which inherits its environment from Eterm itself. This subprocess is usually a shell, but can be anything you specify with the -e option. The shell itself is then responsible for parsing its OWN config files and bringing up your prompt, after which all programs you launch from that prompt inherit their environments from the shell running inside Eterm. The difference between Eterm and other terminal programs is the fact that the default Eterm configuration is to spawn what is called a “login shell.” In other words, Eterm prepends a hyphen (‘-‘) to the shell name when calling
