Is there a way to include another shell script in a shell script to be able to access its functions?
Like how in PHP you can use the include directive with other PHP files in order to run the functions that are contained within simply by calling the function name.
Simply put inside your script :
source FILE
Or
. FILE # POSIX compliant
$ LANG=C help source
source: source filename [arguments]
Execute commands from a file in the current shell.
Read and execute commands from FILENAME in the current shell. The
entries in $PATH are used to find the directory containing FILENAME.
If any ARGUMENTS are supplied, they become the positional parameters
when FILENAME is executed.
Exit Status:
Returns the status of the last command executed in FILENAME; fails if
FILENAME cannot be read.
C language. Here source is executing the child script into the main script. What if I just want to call a particular function from the child script?
. script.sh with ./script.sh. I lost hours trying to figure out what is going on
. other.sh equivalent to a copy and paste of the other script into the parent script or are there any subtle differences?Above answers are correct, but if you run script in another folder, there will be some problem.
For example, a.sh and b.sh are in same folder,
a use . ./b.sh to include b.
When you run script out of the folder, for example, xx/xx/xx/a.sh, file b.sh will not found: ./b.sh: No such file or directory.
So I use
. $(dirname "$0")/b.sh
b.sh further includes a c.sh using . $(dirname "$0")/c.sh, then it will fail miserably because while sourcing/including b, $0 is the shell itself, and I am not aware of any method till date to figure out the directory of b.shYes, use source or the short form which is just .:
. other_script.sh
. version works on sh as well as Bash. The "source" one only works in Bash.Syntax is source <file-name>
ex. source config.sh
script - config.sh
USERNAME="satish"
EMAIL="[email protected]"
calling script -
#!/bin/bash
source config.sh
echo Welcome ${USERNAME}!
echo Your email is ${EMAIL}.
You can learn to include a bash script in another bash script here.
In my situation, in order to include color.sh from the same directory in init.sh, I had to do something as follows.
. ./color.sh
Not sure why the ./ and not color.sh directly. The content of color.sh is as follows.
RED=`tput setaf 1`
GREEN=`tput setaf 2`
BLUE=`tput setaf 4`
BOLD=`tput bold`
RESET=`tput sgr0`
Making use of File color.sh does not error but, the color do not display. I have tested this in Ubuntu 18.04 and the Bash version is:
GNU bash, version 4.4.19(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)
init.sh is (they coincide if you launched it with ./init.sh in the first place).To further source in the sourced file you might set the PATH:
export PATH=$(dirname $0):$PATH
. b.sh
N.B. of course beware of spaces in directorynames.
sourcecommand, the question in itself is asking how to pinpoint the location of asourcefile.