[linux] How to include file in a bash shell script

Is there a way to include another shell script in a shell script to be able to access its functions?

Like how in PHP you can use the include directive with other PHP files in order to run the functions that are contained within simply by calling the function name.

This question is related to linux bash include

The answer is


Syntax is source <file-name>

ex. source config.sh

script - config.sh

USERNAME="satish"
EMAIL="[email protected]"

calling script -

#!/bin/bash
source config.sh
echo Welcome ${USERNAME}!
echo Your email is ${EMAIL}.

You can learn to include a bash script in another bash script here.


Yes, use source or the short form which is just .:

. other_script.sh

Above answers are correct, but if run script in other folder, there will be some problem.

For example, the a.sh and b.sh are in same folder, a include b with . ./b.sh to include.

When run script out of the folder, for example with xx/xx/xx/a.sh, file b.sh will not found: ./b.sh: No such file or directory.

I use

. $(dirname "$0")/b.sh

In my situation, in order to include color.sh from the same directory in init.sh, I had to do something as follows.

. ./color.sh

Not sure why the ./ and not color.sh directly. The content of color.sh is as follows.

RED=`tput setaf 1`
GREEN=`tput setaf 2`
BLUE=`tput setaf 4`
BOLD=`tput bold`
RESET=`tput sgr0`

Making use of File color.sh does not error but, the color do not display. I have tested this in Ubuntu 18.04 and the Bash version is:

GNU bash, version 4.4.19(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)


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