Shell sessions

Types of shell session

Shell sessions can be one of or several instances of the following types:

  • login shell
    • A session that must be authenticated such as when you access remote resources using SSH
  • non-login shell
    • Not the above
  • interactive shell
    • A shell session that runs in the terminal and thus that the user can interact with
  • non-interactive shell
    • A shell session that runs without a terminal

If you are working with a remote server you will be in an interactive login shell. If you run a script from the command line you will be in a non-interactive non-login shell.

Shell sessions and access

The type of shell session that you are currently in affects the Environmental-and-shell-variables-04d5ec7e8e2b486a93f002bf686e4bbb that you can access. This is because the order in which configuration files are read on initialisation differs depending on the type of shell.

  • a session defined as a non-login shell will read /etc/bash.bashrc and then the user-specific ~/.bashrc file to build its environment.
  • A session started as a login session will read configuration details from the /etc/profile file first. It will then look for the first login shell configuration file in the user’s home directory to get user-specific configuration details.

In Linux, if you want the environmental variable to be accessible from both login and non-login shells, you must put them in ~/.bashrc

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