Home/ Questions/Q 640269
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-13T20:56:05+00:00

Have people noticed that if you modify the source of a shell script, any

  • 0

Have people noticed that if you modify the source of a shell script, any instances that are currently running are liable to fail?

This in my opinion is very bad; it means that I have to make sure all instances of a script are stopped before I make changes. My preferred behavior would be that existing scripts continue running with old source code and that new instances use the new code (e.g. what happens for perl and python programs).

Do folks have any good workarounds for this behavior, other than pre-copying the shell script to a tempfile and running from that?

Thanks,
/YGA

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Very slight addition to the other answers:

    #!/bin/sh
{
    # Your stuff goes here
    exit
}

    The exit at the end is important. Otherwise, the script file might still be accessed at the end to see if there are any more lines to interpret.

    This question was later reposted here: Can a shell script indicate that its lines be loaded into memory initially?

    • 0