http://mywiki.wooledge.org/DotFiles great readup
.ICEauthority
Basically ICE is a inter process communication protocol, with authentication, protocol negotiation and potentially multiplexing built in.
It allows two X clients to talk directly to each other, for example, a video player program could potentially talk to a jukebox program to update each other.
As Richard Holloway says, the .ICEAuthority file is for authentication. It contains a number of random cookies. If two programs have the same cookie, then they're allowed to talk to each other. In practice this either means that they're reading the same .ICEAuthority file, or the cookies have been added.
In a lot of ways it's similar to the xauth program & the .Xauthority file, except that .ICEAuthority is used for client to client, while .Xauthority is for client to server..Xauthority
Stores the users x-session auth cookies (not used in sway)
The .Xauthority file (not .xAuthority) can be found in each user home directory and is used to store credentials in cookies used by xauth for authentication of X sessions. Once an X session is started, the cookie is used to authenticate connections to that specific display. You can find more info on X authentication and X authority in the xauth man pages (type man xauth in a terminal)..Xresources
X resources file is a user-level configuration dotfile, typically located at ~/.Xresources. It can be used to set configuration parameters for X client applications.
Among other things they can be used to:
configure terminal preferences (e.g. terminal colors),
set DPI, anti-aliasing, hinting and other X font settings,
--> change the Xcursor theme, <--
theme XScreenSaver,
configure low-level X applications like rxvt-unicode, xorg-xclock and xpdf..profile and .bash_profile (only run on login)
.profile will be read by all shells, .bash_profile only by bash.
When Bash is invoked as an interactive login shell, or as a non-interactive shell with the --login option, it first reads and executes commands from the file /etc/profile, if that file exists. After reading that file, it looks for ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login, and ~/.profile, in that order, and reads and executes commands from the first one that exists and is readable. The --noprofile option may be used when the shell is started to inhibit this behavior.
/etc/profile is run first and always
~/.bash_profile
if no bash_profile --> ~/.bash_login
if no bash_profile or bash_login --> ~/.profile
~/.bash_logout is run when an interactive login shell exits, or a non-interactive login shell executes the exit builtin command.bashrc
runs everytime you open a shell, but not when you login (only if you source it in .profile)getty --> login (PAM) --> magic -/bin/bash
A shell is the generic name for any program that gives you a text-interface to interact with the computer. You type a command and the output is shown on screen.
Many shells have scripting abilities: Put multiple commands in a script and the shell executes them as if they were typed from the keyboard. Most shells offer additional programming constructs that extend the scripting feature into a programming language.
On most Unix/Linux systems multiple shells are available: bash, csh, ksh, sh, tcsh, zsh just to name a few. They differ in the various options they give the user to manipulate the commands and in the complexity and capabilities of the scripting language.
Interactive: As the term implies: Interactive means that the commands are run with user-interaction from keyboard. E.g. the shell can prompt the user to enter input.
Non-interactive: the shell is probably run from an automated process so it can't assume it can request input or that someone will see the output. E.g., maybe it is best to write output to a log file.
Login: Means that the shell is run as part of the login of the user to the system. Typically used to do any configuration that a user needs/wants to establish his work environment.
Non-login: Any other shell run by the user after logging on, or which is run by any automated process which is not coupled to a logged in user.
~/.xinitrc
~/.xinitrc is executed by xinit, which is usually invoked via startx. This program is executed after logging in: first you log in on a text console, then you start the GUI with startx. The role of .xinitrc is to start the GUI part of the session, typically by setting some GUI-related settings such as key bindings (with xmodmap or xkbcomp), X resources (with xrdb), etc., and to launch a session manager or a window manager (possibly as part of a desktop environment).~/.xsession
~/.xsession is executed when you log in in graphical mode (on a display manager) and the display manager invokes the “custom” session type. (With the historical display manager xdm, .xsession is always executed, but with modern display managers that give the user a choice of session type, you usually need to pick “custom” for .xsession to run.) Its role is both to set login-time parameters (such as environment variables) and to start the GUI session. A typical .xsession is
#!/bin/sh
. ~/.profile
. ~/.xinitrc
Xsession.options and Xsession.d in /etc/X11~/.xsessionrc
~/.xsessionrc is executed on Debian (and derivatives such as Ubuntu, Linux Mint, etc.) by the X startup scripts on a GUI login, for all session types and (I think) from all display managers. It's also executed from startx if the user doesn't have a .xinitrc, because in that case startx falls back on the same session startup scripts that are used for GUI login. It's executed relatively early, after loading resources but before starting any program such as a key agent, a D-Bus daemon, etc. It typically sets variables that can be used by later startup scripts. It doesn't have any official documentation that I know of, you have to dig into the source to see what works.
.xinitrc and .xsession are historical features of the X11 Window system so they should be available and have a similar behavior on all Unix systems. On the other hand, .xsessionrc is a Debian feature and distributions that are not based on Debian don't have it unless they've implemented something similar.~/.xprofile
.xprofile is very similar to .xsessionrc, but it's part of the session startup script some display managers including GDM (the GNOME display manager) and lightdm, but not others such as xdm and kdm.