Home / ubuntu / Questions / 1214901
In Process
Hedley Finger
Asked: 2020-03-05 16:17:43 +0800 CST

How to fix ~/.profile and ~/.bashrc syntax errors

  • 772

Ubuntu 18.04.4 (automatic upgrade from 18.04.3 just a few weeks ago)
/bin/bash

After I log in from the Gnome shell, this message appears while the screen is just plain purple and before the desktop appears:

Error found when loading /home/hfinger/.profile:  

/home/hfinger/.profile: line 1: #: command not found  
/home/hfinger/.bashrc: line 1: syntax error near unexpected token '('
/home/hfinger/.bashrc: line 1: '# ~/.bashrc: executed by bash(1) for non-login shells.'  

As a result the session will not be configured correctly.  
You should fix the problem as soon as feasible.

Trouble is, what is the problem? I have searched AskUbuntu but no-one appears to have experienced this exact problem. I don't think it is the upgrade because it had been running for about a month before this problem appeared.

I have never touched these two files because I am quite happy to let the system create and configure them. Also, I try to keep Ubuntu as vanilla as possible to avoid having to restore settings after upgrading to a new release. For what it is worth, here are the first lines of each of these files: 

.profile, line 1: # ~/.profile: executed by the command interpreter for login shells.  
.bashrc, line 1: # ~/.bashrc: executed by bash(1) for non-login shells.

How do I need to fix these files? What additional information should I provide so that someone more knowledgeable than I can solve this dopey problem?

upgrade bashrc .profile 18.04 syntax

3 Answers

  1. This can happen if your files have a non-printing byte sequence at the start - for example a byte order mark - perhaps as a result of having edited them in a word processor program or Windows text editor.

    For example, given

    $ file profile bashrc
profile: UTF-8 Unicode (with BOM) text
bashrc:  UTF-8 Unicode (with BOM) text

    (where profile and bashrc are local copies of my ~/.profile and ~/.bashrc with byte sequence 0xFE 0xFF inserted at the start) then

    $ bash -c 'source profile; source bashrc'
profile: line 1: #: command not found
bashrc: line 1: syntax error near unexpected token `('
bashrc: line 1: `# ~/.bashrc: executed by bash(1) for non-login shells.'

    The simplest fix is to use dos2unix, which removes the BOM by default:

    $ dos2unix profile bashrc
dos2unix: converting file profile to Unix format...
dos2unix: converting file bashrc to Unix format...

$ file profile bashrc
profile: ASCII text
bashrc:  UTF-8 Unicode text

    Or you can simply replace the files with fresh copies from the /etc/skel directory as you discovered (although obviously you will lose any customizations that way).

    Other ways to check for non-printing bytes are

    cat -A ~/.profile ~/.bashrc

    in which a BOM will show up as a control sequence like M-oM-;M-?# or using xxd or od to examine the byte sequences directly

    head -1 ~/.profile | od -tx1

xxd -l16 ~/.profile

    The diff command is helpful insofar as confirming there is a difference, but not in identifying what the difference is:

    $ diff profile ~/.profile
1c1
< # ~/.profile: executed by the command interpreter for login shells.
---
> # ~/.profile: executed by the command interpreter for login shells.
    • 7

  2. The easy way to check the user's shell...

    If you don't have Users and Groups application already installed, install it this way...

    sudo apt-get update

    sudo apt-get install gnome-system-tools

    Hit the Super key and type "Users", select Users and Groups application, click on the account name, then Advanced Settings, Advanced tab, and verify the correct Shell of /bin/bash.

    • 1

  3. Ubuntu 18.04.4 (automatic upgrade from 18.04.3 just a few weeks ago)
    /bin/bash

    I don't know what the problem was but this is the way I fixed it:

    $ cd ~ 
$ which bash
/bin/bash  
$ mv .profile .profile.bak  
$ mv .bashrc .bashrc.bak  
$ cd /etc/skel/  
$ cp .profile ~/.profile  
$ cp .bashrc ~/.bashrc

    (Note: /bin/bash is the correct location for bash.)

    Thanks everybody for your comments and assistance.

    • 1