Startup or run control files

For bash users, there are two files of interest: .bashrc and .bash_profile. These are (or should be) located in your home directory. The .bash_profile is sourced for each interactive login session, while the .bashrc is sourced for all interactive sessions. Normally .bashrc contains most of the setup and is invoked from within .bash_profile.

These files contain settings for a variety of environmental variables, which are visible to all applications. A good example to look at is ~amit/.bash_profile and ~amit/.bashrc.