Shell Programming and Scripting

Hiya all,

Simple question - yet no simple answer im afraid !

Is there a way to execute a shell script (child) which returns one line and get the current (parent) shell to execute the stdout from the child ???

example

child.sh
#!/bin/sh
echo "setenv DISPLAY xxx:03"

parent_prompt> ./child.sh
setenv DISPLAY xxx:03 #<--- parent would exe this line ????

many many thanks in advance for your feedback effort support and time in this .....

parents executing what their kids make...! what has the world come to...?

Code:

man xargs

And the answer is...

Code:

parent_prompt> eval `./child.sh`  # That's backticks, not quotes!

:-)

-c

The parent process needs to invoke the child process using command substitution.

Code:

cat parent.ksh
#!/usr/bin/ksh

LINE=$(chld.sh)

and the child process should simply echo (return) the desired line.

Code:

cat child.ksh
#!/usr/bin/ksh

echo "setenv DISPLAY xxx:03"

Shamrock -- that will only set LINE to whatever;s come from the child. You'd need another line to execute the contents of $LINE

-c

Correct craigp84...eval would be the way to go as shown in your post.