Want to understand the meaning of the following line - Shell Programming and Scripting

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Want to understand the meaning of the following line

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Thread: Want to understand the meaning of the following line

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#3 (permalink)

05-24-2007

blowtorch

Supporter

Join Date: Dec 2004

Location: Singapore

Posts: 2,350

What shell are you using for this? I tried this with sh, ksh and bash, and it worked with all three. I had to make one modification though:

Code:

#!/usr/bin/bash

echo "Hello World"
. ./test_common.lib
get_info

Without the "./" it was giving a "./test.sh: test_common.lib: not found" error under sh and ksh.

As for the explanation of how the ". test_common.lib" line works, here's how:

When you run . test_common.lib, or in my case . ./test_common.lib, the statements in the test_common.lib file are processed inside the calling shell itself, unlike when you just run ./test_common.lib (this forks a seperate process). Because the calling shell processes these, any statements such as variable definitions, function definitions, etc are stored in the calling shell and are available for later use.

Hope that was clear (though it probably isn't).