Logged in to "-bash", not to "bash". And what is the difference?

Question

I logged in via ssh to a remote Ubuntu-Machine.

By default I'm in a terminal called -bash (note the hyphen). This bash does not load/use my ~/.bashrc.

When entering bash into the terminal, I get to a terminal, which also uses my .bashrc.

Now, what is the difference between -bash and bash. Why am I logged in by default to the -bash version. I executed chsh -s /bin/bash and restarted the machine already, which according to this post sets the default environment. That seems to fail. And last but not least, if I can't change to the "normal" bash, how can I get -bash to use my .bashrc?

To illustrate my problem, here is the workflow showing console output:

user@machine:~$ echo $0
-bash
user@machine:~$ bash
~: echo $0
bash

Answer 1

For shells, prefixing argv[0] with a dash is a traditional way of asking it to be a "login shell" (equivalent to e.g. bash --login). Login shells differ from "regular" ones in that they use a different startup script (e.g. ~/.profile instead of ~/.bashrc) – it might show a greeting, check mail, start ssh-agent, and so on… in other words, tasks which only need to be done once.

Usually, the login shell needs to be manually told to load .bashrc using:

. ~/.bashrc

or:

source ~/.bashrc

at the end of the ~/.bash_profile script.