Shell Programming and Scripting

Simple in what way? If anyone but you has to touch the internals of that script at all ever again, they'll understand "source filename", but may need to dig for hours or days to understand what your objective with set is and why it's suddenly not working. Build something too clever and you might return to it in a year to find you have no idea what you were thinking.

Another way to do a remote script without copying files to the servers would be 'ssh servername < script-file'. Either way though, it's just better to have the function stored in a way you can use it than try to rip it out from inside the shell.

You could also try making the script a here-document, saving it to a temporary file, sourcing it, and sending it on from there. self-contained. You'll find yourself banging your head against the wall having to escape every little thing inside the here-document to make it work though.

or you could send the entire script itself through ssh: 'ssh servername < "$0"', providing your script's written in a way it can tolerate that and not recur infinitely.

Code:

typeset -f function_name

Should work in bash, ksh, and pdksh, if i'm not mistaken.

Regards,
alister

Thanks. That looks like just what I was looking for. Of course, as Corona688 pointed out I may have to consider whether I'm getting too clever. It doesn't seem so, but it wouldn't have been the first time.

Thanks again to everyone for your input, especially those of you in Europe. It's got to be after midnight there!

Mark E. Hamilton