.bash_profile? .bashrc?

Day 2 was essentially an all-day installapalooza. It was quite the undertaking for our instructor, who needed to walk 24 adults with different OSs, prior installations/environments, levels of experience with the command line, etc., through the process of getting Node.js, nvm and npm all set up in just one day.

Things went smoothly for me, for the most part, although I encountered some problems in getting nvm to work after running its install script as directed here: https://github.com/creationix/nvm.

Had something to do with path/environment issues, so I inserted the following line into my bash profile (.bashrc) as directed by my instructor (and nvm's github readme): "source ~/.nvm/nvm.sh".

But this didn't fix the problem. I was mystified, at which point my instructor came around and showed me one of the many reasons it's preferable to have an instructor instead of hacking it alone: he figured out in minutes what would've had me spinning my wheels for hours.

I'd been editing my .bashrc file to no avail, after which my instructor had me edit the .bash_profile file. I hadn't known that there were multiple bash profile files, nor did I know why that is the case prior to looking into it a bit more deeply, which led me to this blog post on the subject:

http://www.joshstaiger.org/archives/2005/07/bash_profile_vs.html