the padded cell
Björn Andersson
1 min read

If you start a non-interactive bash shell it will source the content of the file defined in BASH_ENV (and ENV for a POSIX shell).

When bash is started non-interactively, to run a shell script, for example, it looks for the variable BASH_ENV in the environment, expands its value if it appears there, and uses the expanded value as the name of a file to read and execute. Bash behaves as if the following command were executed:

if [ -n "$BASH_ENV" ]; then . "$BASH_ENV"; fi

but the value of the PATH variable is not used to search for the file name.