After about two months of wondering why I couldn’t get Crux to accept the bash profile I gave it, I realized my error, and now I feel quite stupid about it.

Very simply, while I’m used to the adduser dialogue that Arch and some other distros use, I have been using useradd and usermod to build accounts in Crux. And of course, after glazing over the help flag output for about a hundred times, I realized that I had never set the shell for those accounts, and that’s probably why they weren’t showing the proper prompt or accepting the .bash_profile terms I gave them.

So if you find yourself in a similar predicament, you might just need to apply a shell option to the account.

usermod -s /bin/bash kmandla

And suddenly everything is sunshine and daisies again. Quite dumb, wasn’t it? 🙄 This is one of those humbling moments that’s supposedly good for your soul.