What Is The Source Command And How I Use It In Bash

1. NOTES

Pavol Kutaj
Feb 18, 2022
  • source is a bash shell built-in command that executes the content of the file passed as an argument, in the current shell. It has a synonym in . (period).
Syntax

. filename [arguments]

source filename [arguments]

2. USE: CONFIG FILE EXECUTION

  • I have many config files (per environment)
  • On top of that, there is a single script that accepts these config files; the script is a wrapper of another python script that does the job
  • The config file has lines such as
db_name="foo"
db_port="5439"
...
...
  • I source (execute the contents of) the config file within the wrapper to assign the bindings within the wrapper's runtime
env = $1
config = ${root_dir}/${env}/config.txt
source "${config}"
  • Wrapper passes these bindings into another python script

3. LINKS

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Pavol Kutaj

Today I Learnt | Infrastructure Support Engineer at snowplow.io with a passion for cloud infrastructure/terraform/python/docs. More at https://pavol.kutaj.com