When we have entered the chroot'ed environment in the next section we want to export a couple of environment variables in that shell such as PS1, PATH and others variables a user wants to have set. For that purpose we'll create the $LFS/root/.bash_profile file which will be read by bash when we enter the chroot environment. Create a new file $LFS/root/.bash_profile by running the following. cat > $LFS/root/.bash_profile << "EOF" # Begin /root/.bash_profile PS1='\u:\w\$ ' PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin export PS1 PATH # End /root/.bash_profile EOF More environment variables,aliases and whatever else is needed/wanted can be added at the users own discretion as he deems them necessary.