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In the shell, .bash_profile is used to customize the configuration of user settings. It is stored in the root directory or home directory and is mostly hidden from other users.

This file holds all the configuration of the shell and is also known as a configuration script. It includes variable specifications, exported variables, etc.

This article will show you how to create, delete, and edit .bash_profile in macOS. We will go through the necessary commands step by step.

Create .bash_profile

In this part, we will learn how to create .bash_profile. For this, we will use the following command:

touch .bash_profile

Now, when we are done creating .bash_profile, we can check the file using the following command:

ls -la

After executing this command, you will get output similar to the following:

total 16
drwxr-xr-x 1 author author 4096 Aug  7 11:42 .
drwxr-xr-x 1 root   root   4096 Nov  1  2021 ..
-rw------- 1 author author 5378 Aug  6 01:46 .bash_history
-rw-r--r-- 1 author author  220 Nov  1  2021 .bash_logout
-rw-r--r-- 1 author author    0 Aug  7 11:42 .bash_profile
-rw-r--r-- 1 author author 3771 Nov  1  2021 .bashrc
drwx------ 1 author author 4096 Dec 18  2021 .cache
drwx------ 1 author author 4096 Dec 18  2021 .config
drwx------ 1 author author 4096 Dec 18  2021 .dbus
drwxr-xr-x 1 author author 4096 Nov  1  2021 .landscape
-rw-r--r-- 1 author author    0 Aug  7 11:41 .motd_shown
-rw-r--r-- 1 author author  807 Nov  1  2021 .profile
-rw-r--r-- 1 author author    0 Nov 29  2021 .sudo_as_admin_successful
-rw-r--r-- 1 author author    0 Jul  6 15:26 disk_usage.txt

Here you can see .bash_profile listed.

Edit and reload .bash_profile

We have successfully created .bash_profile. Now, it’s time to make some modifications to it.

To modify .bash_profile, you can use nono editor. You can open .bash_profile using nono editor by following the command below.

nano .bash_profile

When we are done modifying the .bash_profile file, we need to reload the file for the customization to take effect. To do this, we can use either of the following two commands.

source .bash_profile

Or we can use,

source ~/.bash_profile

We have now completed the creation and modification of .bash_profile. We did this from the command line; you can do it manually using any text editor.

请注意, all the codes used in this article are written in Bash. It can only be run in the Linux Shell environment.