A breakdown of the different files loaded on start up
Murex has several profile files which are loaded in the following order of execution:
~/.murex_preload
~/.murex_modules/*/
~/.murex_profile
.murex_preload
This file should only used to define any environmental variables that
might need to be set before the modules are loaded (eg including
directories in $PATH
if you have anything installed in
non-standard locations).
Most of the time this file will be empty bar the standard warning message:
# This file is loaded before any murex modules. It should only contain
# environmental variables required for the modules to work eg:
#
# export PATH=...
#
# Any other profile config belongs in your profile script instead:
# /home/$USER/.murex_profile
This file is created upon the first run of Murex.
.murex_modules/
Murex’s module directory - where all the modules are installed to.
This directory is managed by murex-package
builtin.
.murex_profile
This file is comparable to .bash_profile
,
.bashrc
and .zshrc
etc. It is the standard
place to put all user and/or machine specific config in.
.murex_profile
is only read from the users home
directory. Unlike bash et al, profiles will not be read from
/etc/profile.d
nor similar. Modules should be used in its
place.
Each of the config paths can be manually overridden:
MUREX_PRELOAD
defines the preload path and file
nameMUREX_MODULES
defines the module pathMUREX_PROFILE
defines the profile path and file
nameMUREX_HISTORY
defines the history path and file
nameWhere MUREX_PRELOAD
, MUREX_PROFILE
and/or
MUREX_HISTORY
are directories rather than absolute file
names, the path is appended with the default file names. ie the file
name listed above.
You can also specify one directory for all the above entities via the following environmental variable:
MUREX_CONFIG_DIR
This path can be superseded for specific entities by using (for
example) MUREX_PRELOAD
. This would mean those entities
would follow their specific environmental variable path while unnamed
entities would fall back to MUREX_CONFIG_DIR
.
If the path does not exist, then it is created automatically by Murex.
Some individuals, particularly those running Linux, follow a standard called XDG Base Directory Specification. By default, Murex does not adhere to this standard, instead conforming to the de facto standard defined by the past precedents of previous shells.
The reason for this is because XDG wouldn’t apply to systems without desktop, non-POSIX systems like Windows, nor even many UNIX-like systems such as macOS.
However For people who wish to use XDG paths you can still enforce that Murex stores its config in XDG base directories via a line similar to the following:
export MUREX_CONFIG_DIR="$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/murex/"
This, however, depends on $XDG_CONFIG_HOME
pointing to a
single path rather than an array of paths (like $PATH
). In
that instance you can still use custom paths in Murex but you might need
to get a little more creative in how you define that value.
history
): Outputs murex’s command historyexport
): Define an environmental variable and set it’s
valuemurex-package
): Murex’s package managerThis document was generated from gen/user-guide/profile_doc.yaml.
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Last built on Wed Jul 2 22:12:32 UTC 2025 against commit bb72b6fbb72b6fdd502f835172d7d06207ba4ec2c70886c.
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