Shell Programming and Scripting

I setup alias on my .bash_profile. It works very will until I did another sh on command prompt. I typed alias on new shell and all the definitions did not carry over. How to correct this? Thanks in advance.

give some examples...

According to the bash man page , .bash_profile is executed for a login shell, while .bashrc is executed for interactive non-login shells. When you invoke another bash shell on the command line you are invoking an interactive non-login shell; hence the alias definitions in your .bash_profile are not available.

alias OH='cd ${ORACLE_HOME}' is in both .bash_profile and .bashrc.
-> echo $HOME;alias OH
/home/oracle
alias OH='cd ${ORACLE_HOME}'
after following command:
-> sh
-> echo $HOME;alias OH
/home/oracle
sh: alias: OH: not found

alias does not exist anymore but export value still there.

Try to start a new shell with bash instead of sh.

Regards

Thanks for your info. You are correct but I do not understand why. Both sh and bash are using /bin/bash. I thought they should act the same.

-> type sh
sh is hashed (/bin/sh)
-> ls -lt /bin/sh
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 Nov 30 2007 /bin/sh -> bash


-> type bash
bash is hashed (/bin/bash)
-> ls -lt /bin/bash
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 772760 Apr 12 2006 /bin/bash

bash examines the name it's running as, and behaves differently if it's sh