/etc/profile is the file you are looking for. You scripts (in /etc/rc.d or something like that depending on your distro) get run every time you boot the system. /etc/profile gets parsed everytime a user logs on, no matter who that use is, then their personal ~/.profile or ~/.bash_profile (didn't realise you could use this name!) gets parsed, possibly overriding settings gleamed from /etc/profile. Note that different shell use different personal files, so for csh/tcsh you would use ~/.cshrc - dunno about other shells...
HTH
Jamie...
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