What I do is: ln -s ~/.bashrc ~/.bash_profile
To always have the same settings
Possibly a bad idea. If you only use your .bashrc to store a couple variables, that'll get you by. If you're actually using your .bashrc / .zshrc / whatever, that doesn't make sense to do. For example, by .zshrc provides a completely new command, sets console-specific settings (like mime-type support), overrides the operation of several commands so that they may not work as expected in scripts, and so on. I think as a general guideline, your profile file should have _just_ settings like "EDITOR=vim" or "PATH=blah". Maybe you could put aliases in there also. If you want to have "the same settings" in both cases, just have your .bashrc source your .bash_profile. Cheers, -Andrei Thorp