Shell Programming and Scripting

If the executable is /home/execs/testing/compare, then you will either need to:-In all cases, it would have to give you read & execute privilege, else the shell will ignore it when searching down the path or fail permissions if you give it as a full path.

Can you do a whence compare or which compare just before you call compare?

Perhaps the output from file /home/execs/testing/compare would help too.



Robin

Don't do that, ever. There's many reasons DOS-style path handling never became popular outside DOS.

Also, your (custom modified) $PATH looks VERY limited, will it find find, ls, grep, awk or even your shell?
With that $PATH, it wont find any of these, if they are at their regular locations. (edit: scratch that, just seen you had /bin, though, that might - but not granted - contain all the binaries required)

For the future, try:

Code:

PATH+=":/my_data/execs:/universal/execs/:/newpath/configure/:/test_dir/"

Note the + before the =!

AFAIK, its a bad habit to 'overwrite' $HOME with a custom location such as /home/execs/testing.
I'd recommend to set a new/other variable, and call it like, BASE or base or even more appropriate: WORKDIR=/home/execs/testing.

hth

sea is absolutely correct about not messing with HOME.

While += works in some shells, it doesn't work on some. (For example, /bin/sh on Solaris systems won't accept it.) The standard way to do it (supported by all shells based on Bourne shell syntax) would be:

Code:

PATH="$PATH:/my_data/execs:/universal/execs:/newpath/configure:/test_dir"

Note that the trailing slashes aren't needed; any element in the list of directories in PATH that isn't a directory will fail when attempting to add a command name to it anyway.

If you were writing a shell script (or a C program) that is intended to run with set-UJID or set-GID privileges and your program runs anything not using an absolute pathname to invoke it, then you should provide a PATH variable that is know to find the "desired" version of any programs invoked (not something that could spoof a "standard" utility and grab extended privileges for use later), but that is a much more complicated topic that clearly does not apply to this script.