De man bash
:
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.
Se não for um shell de login, o Bash procura ~/.bashrc
. Se for um shell de login, ~/.profile
é o arquivo último que procura e somente se nenhum dos outros listados no parágrafo acima for encontrado.