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Invoking Bash

In addition to the single-character shell command-line options (see section The Set Builtin), there are several multi-character options that you can use. These options must appear on the command line before the single-character options to be recognized.

-norc
Don't read the `~/.bashrc' initialization file in an interactive shell. This is on by default if the shell is invoked as sh.

-rcfile filename
Execute commands from filename (instead of `~/.bashrc') in an interactive shell.

-noprofile
Don't load the system-wide startup file `/etc/profile' or any of the personal initialization files `~/.bash_profile', `~/.bash_login', or `~/.profile' when bash is invoked as a login shell.

-version
Display the version number of this shell.

-login
Make this shell act as if it were directly invoked from login. This is equivalent to `exec - bash' but can be issued from another shell, such as csh. If you wanted to replace your current login shell with a Bash login shell, you would say `exec bash -login'.

-nobraceexpansion
Do not perform curly brace expansion (see section Brace Expansion).

-nolineediting
Do not use the GNU Readline library (see section Command Line Editing) to read interactive command lines.

-posix
Change the behavior of Bash where the default operation differs from the Posix 1003.2 standard to match the standard. This is intended to make Bash behave as a strict superset of that standard.

There are several single-character options you can give which are not available with the set builtin.

-c string
Read and execute commands from string after processing the options, then exit.

-i
Force the shell to run interactively.

-s
If this flag is present, or if no arguments remain after option processing, then commands are read from the standard input. This option allows the positional parameters to be set when invoking an interactive shell.

An interactive shell is one whose input and output are both connected to terminals (as determined by isatty()), or one started with the -i option.

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