SuSe 9.2

Independe de distro, depende mais do shell que usa.
Normalmente começa com
man bash
mais se quiser ser rápido, /etc/profile

Citação:

Postado originalmente por man bash

INVOCATION
...
When bash is invoked as an interactive login shell, or as a non-inter‐
active shell with the --login option, it first reads and executes com‐
mands 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.
When a login shell exits, bash reads and executes commands from the
file ~/.bash_logout, if it exists.
...