On Mon, May 21, 2001 at 12:42:39PM -0700, larry a price wrote:
>
>also what does the
>
>. /etc/path/to/script
>
>idiom do, it doesn't seem to be documented in the place i expect it to be
>but i see it used in a number of scripts in /etc/postgresql
>
>can someone point me to a clear and lucid explanation of what's going on,
>i've read the man pages but they are rather opaque...and i'm still not
>getting what i expect from the beast.
In Bourne-derived shells, . is a shorthand for the "source" command, which
reads a file into the execution environment. From the bash manpage:
source filename [arguments]
Read and execute commands from filename in the cur�
rent shell environment and return the exit status
of the last command executed from filename. If
filename does not contain a slash, file names in
PATH are used to find the directory containing
filename. The file searched for in PATH need not
be executable. The current directory is searched
if no file is found in PATH. If the sourcepath
option to the shopt builtin command is turned off,
the PATH is not searched. If any arguments are
supplied, they become the positional parameters
when filename is executed. Otherwise the
positional parameters are unchanged. The return
status is the status of the last command exited
within the script (0 if no commands are executed),
and false if filename is not found or cannot be
read.
--
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Thanato thanaton patisas;
Kai tis en tis mnimasi
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