Anders Johansson wrote: ----------------->>>> re the replying: Not a problem. It's not like I have a life (or, these days, even a job) or anything :) One reason it's not being parsed is that you perhaps aren't using bash?! Perhaps a spelling error? Or perhaps you didn't really log out, but just exited X?! You have to log out all the way to the login: prompt for .bashrc to be read. And yes, DEFAULT_WM is another way to deal with it. That would change it for all users who haven't made their own personalizations. That may not always be desired, but hey: it works :) ----------------->>>> I don't seem to have a life either... But I like it this way! Pretty sure bash is it. Seeing me prompt says: bash:~ # Exited clean out! So I added echo "I parsed .bashrc" in the file and got nothing on logout-login. So I put export WINDOWMANAGER=/usr/X11R6/bin/FOOBAR in the .bash_profile and logout-login and echo $WINDOWMANGER was /usr/X11R6/bin/FOOBAR I then changed it to gnome and did the logout-login thing resetting it to the correct wm. It seems that the .bash_profile is the file I need to mess with.