newbie: startup files under bash...

[alan brown]

My reading has told me that when I start up a new bash shell /etc/profile and /etc/bash.bashrc are run.  And then ~/.profile and ~/.bashrc and ~/.bash_profile are run   So I’m trying to set the PATH environment variable to include my java bin directory.  So I created a .profile file in my home directory (one didn’t exist before) and simply put in the line…   export PATH=$PATH:/home/myhome/javahome/bin   However, when I started up a new shell and ran ‘echo $PATH’ it didn’t take effect.   Not only that, but the path that was returned to me did not appear in any of the above files.    Is there some other file that I’m missing that has been read and defined the PATH variable? What is the right file to set my PATH variable?   Thanks in advance.