Comments on A shell script that can run under different shells
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A shell script that can run under different shells
I have a shell script with a syntax compatible to both bash and zsh, except for a section that has zsh specific syntax that throws syntax errors if sourced from bash.
Is there an easy way to escape such section when using bash?
The script is a bash function that sources all the files in a directory. It works fine from zsh (and it is irrelevant to the question).
#!/usr/bin/env bash
shell=$(ps -p $$ -oargs=)
if [ $shell = "bash" ]; then
for f in ~/.functions.d/*.sh; do source $f; done
elif [ $shell = "zsh" ]; then
for f (~/.functions.d/**/*.sh) source $f
fi
The error raised when sourcing it in bash is:
scr: line 8: syntax error near unexpected token `('
scr: line 8: ` for f (~/.functions.d/**/*.sh) source $f'
Relevant links:
- This same question in Stack Overflow.
- Unix & Linux: Source only part of a script from another script?
- Stack Overflow: Using source to include part of a file in a bash script.
Post
I'm not familiar with zsh, but it seems to me that your problem here is that the syntax for for loops is different in bash and zsh, which throws bash off as it tries to interpret your script, finds a keyword it knows but the rest of the statement doesn't match what it expects.
The solution would seem to me to be to put the shell-specific parts in separate files, and only source the file matching the current execution environment into the script. So you might have a main script like:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
shell=$(ps -p $$ -oargs= | awk '{print $1}')
if [ $shell = "bash" ]; then
source ./bash-source.sh
elif [ $shell = "zsh" ]; then
source ./zsh-source.sh
fi
as well as bash-source.sh
for f in ~/.functions.d/*.sh; do source $f; done
and zsh-source.sh
for f (~/.functions.d/**/*.sh) source $f
This way, each shell only sees the for statement with the correct syntax for it, and therefore doesn't get tripped up by trying to parse the other. This relies on the fact that at least bash doesn't actually parse a file until it's loaded, and loading happens only when the source statement is actually executed.
If zsh deals gracefully with this situation, you might not need to split the bash source loop into its own file; but clearly bash doesn't like to see the zsh for (as evidenced by the fact that you're getting an error relating to it), and thus bash needs a little hand-holding.
Also note that I had to add | awk '{print $1}' to the $shell assignment. Without it, when within a bash shell script, $shell was assigned the whole execution command line; in other words, bash ./filename.sh even when executing the script only as ./filename.sh. There's almost certainly a more efficient way to do that; for the moment, I simply needed something that got me past that assignment and would likely give the intended value. This does however suggest some system-dependence in the ps output that you may need to deal with, depending on just how portable you want this script to be.
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