Regarding Bash_profile

Iam newbie to suse
I have installed suse 10.2.
My problem is I had to export a path to the bash_profile.
The path is a set of libraries of a fortran compiler
I am unable to find the file bash_profile even after enabling show hidden files.
I suppose it is not there in my HOME directory
Is it true that if only user is there then there won't be any bash-profile or do I have to create one
some one can please help me out in this

Iam newbie to suse
I have installed suse 10.2.
My problem is I had to export a path to the bash_profile.
The path is a set of libraries of a fortran compiler
I am unable to find the file bash_profile even after enabling show hidden files.
I suppose it is not there in my HOME directory
Is it true that if only one user is there then there won't be any bash-profile or do I have to create one
some one can please help me out in this

It's .bash_profile (starts with dot). If not there you can create it, it doesn't necessarily exist already.

It may be better to put your initialisation in .bashrc because .bashrc is read by all interactive shells, login or not, whereas .bash_profile is read by interactive login shells. Of course as environment variable settings are inherited, as long as the initialisation is done in some login shell ancestor, you will get it, so most of the time there will not be a difference.

One case where there is a difference is when you run a remote command via ssh, the shell will not be interactive and login, so you will not get the settings in .bash_profile but you will get .bashrc because bash decides (or sshd makes bash decide, haven't checked) that it is run by a remote shell daemon and therefore will read .bashrc. Check the bash man page for the gruesome details.

You can add exports to ~/.bashrc file. For Intel compiler exports are defined in a separate file, that can be sourced from .bashrc

# fortran compiler setup 
source /opt/intel/fc/10.1.008/bin/ifortvars.sh