Let's assume I have this line at the start of my ~/.bash_profile:
echo "*** THIS IS ~/.bash_profile RUNNING ***"
On a Linux machine (Ubuntu 14.04), I can inspect which files bash loads at startup with strace, so I do this:
strace -f bash --login 2>&1 | tee /tmp/log.strace
# type [ENTER] here, or "hello" [ENTER], then Ctrl+C to exit
grep 'bash_' /tmp/log.strace
The result is as expected:
faccessat(AT_FDCWD, "/etc/profile.d/bash_completion.sh", R_OK) = 0 open("/etc/profile.d/bash_completion.sh", O_RDONLY) = 3 open("~/.bash_profile", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "echo \"*** THIS IS ~/.bash_profil"..., 48) = 48 write(1, "*** THIS IS ~/.bash_profile RUNN"..., 40*** THIS IS ~/.bash_profile RUNNING ***
However, I've logged in on an OSX 10.9 machine via ssh, and I need to do the same. Since there is no strace on OSX, I used dtruss, like this:
dtruss -f bash --login 2>&1 | tee /tmp/log.dtruss
# type [ENTER] here, or "hello" [ENTER], then Ctrl+C to exit
grep 'bash_' /tmp/log.dtruss
Strangely, there seems to be no mention of ~/.bash_profile ever being loaded:
$ grep 'bash_' /tmp/log.dtruss $
..., - even if, if I just run bash --login on that OSX machine, I can see the above echo being printed, which means ~/.bash_profile must be loaded?!
Of course, dtruss does report accessing other files:
$ grep 'open\|stat' /tmp/log.dtruss
41819/0xce5a2: stat64("/AppleInternal\0", 0x7FFF5CBC2A88, 0x0) = -1 Err#2
41819/0xce5a2: stat64("/usr/lib/dtrace/libdtrace_dyld.dylib\0", 0x7FFF5CBC23F8, 0x7FFF5CBC3330) = 0 0
41819/0xce5a2: open("/usr/lib/dtrace/libdtrace_dyld.dylib\0", 0x0, 0x0) = 3 0
41819/0xce5a2: stat64("/usr/lib/libncurses.5.4.dylib\0", 0x7FFF5CBC2208, 0x7FFF5CBC30A0) = 0 0
...
41819/0xce5a2: open("/dev/tty\0", 0x6, 0x7FFF79D33940) = 3 0
41819/0xce5a2: open_nocancel("/usr/share/locale/en_US.UTF-8/LC_COLLATE\0", 0x0, 0x1B6) = 3 0
...
41819/0xce5a2: stat64("~/.fastlane/bin/bash\0", 0x7FFF5CBC37E0, 0x0) = -1 Err#2
41819/0xce5a2: stat64("/usr/bin/bash\0", 0x7FFF5CBC37E0, 0x0) = -1 Err#2
41819/0xce5a2: stat64("/bin/bash\0", 0x7FFF5CBC37E0, 0x0) = 0 0
41819/0xce5a2: stat64("/bin/bash\0", 0x7FFF5CBC3820, 0x0) = 0 0
...
..., for instance we can see that the $HOME directory is accessed as part of searching through $PATH (and in fact, that PATH="~/.fastlane/bin:$PATH" is set in that very same ~/.bash_profile).
My question is - how come this happens? Is there a special invocation of dtruss that I need to use, so it reports when files like ~/.bash_profile are accessed? Or is there another program on OSX that I should use to achieve the same kind of file open tracing, that strace allows on Linux? Or is the process starting on OSX so different, that it "loads" ~/.bash_profile for a bash process somehow in the background, before bash ever starts running as a standalone process?
