Question

I am trying to write what should be a super simple bash script. Basically activate a virtual env and than change to the working directory. A task i do a lot and condesing to one command just made sense.

Basically …

#!/bin/bash
source /usr/local/turbogears/pps_beta/bin/activate
cd /usr/local/turbogears/pps_beta/src

However when it runs it just dumps back to the shell and i am still in the directory i ran the script from and the environment isn’t activated.

Answer 1

All you need to do is to run your script with the source command. This is because the cd command is local to the shell that runs it. When you run a script directly, a new shell is executed which terminates when it reaches the script’s end of file. By using the source command you tell the shell to directly execute the script’s instructions.