Assumindo que bash
é seu shell padrão, as diferenças são descritas na página bash
man ( man bash
):
When bash is invoked as an interactive login shell, or as a non-interac-
tive shell with the --login option, it first reads and executes commands
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.
Há mais detalhes na página man que aborda o modo de compatibilidade POSIX-shell, que é de onde vem .profile
. Leia toda a seção da página man para todos os detalhes.