Getting a source not found error when using source in a bash script

Question

I m trying to write  what I thought would be  a simple bash script that will    run virtualenv to create a new environment at  1 activate the virtual environment do some more stuff  install django  add django-admin py to the virtualenv s path  etc     Step 1 works quite well  but I can t seem to activate the virtualenv  For those not familiar with virtualenv  it creates an activate file that activates the virtual environment  From the CLI  you run it using source  source  env name bin activate   Where  env name  obviously  is the name of the dir that the virtual env is installed in   In my script  after creating the virtual environment  I store the path to the activate script like this   activate   pwd   ENV NAME bin activate    But when I call source   activate   I get this    home clawlor bin scripts djangoenv  20  source  not found   I know that  activate contains the correct path to the activate script  in fact I even test that a file is there before I call source  But source itself can t seem to find it  I ve also tried running all of the steps manually in the CLI  where everything works fine   In my research I found this script  which is similar to what I want but is also doing a lot of other things that I don t need  like storing all of the virtual environments in a    virtualenv directory  or whatever is in  WORKON HOME   But it seems to me that he is creating the path to activate  and calling source   activate  in basically the same way I am   Here is the script in it s entirety      bin sh  PYTHON PATH   bin python-2 6 1 bin python  if        1   then     ENV NAME   1      virtualenv -p  PYTHON PATH --no-site-packages  ENV NAME     activate   pwd   ENV NAME bin activate       if     -f   activate        then         echo  ERROR  activate not found at  activate          return 1     fi      source   activate  else     echo  Usage  djangoenv ENV NAME  fi   DISCLAIMER  My bash script-fu is pretty weak  I m fairly comfortable at the CLI  but there may well be some extremely stupid reason this isn t working

User · Accepted Answer

If you re writing a bash script  call it by name      bin bash    bin sh is not guaranteed to be bash  This caused a ton of broken scripts in Ubuntu some years ago  IIRC    The source builtin works just fine in bash  but you might as well just use dot like Norman suggested

User · Answer

In Ubuntu if you execute the script with sh scriptname sh you get this problem   Try executing the script with   scriptname sh instead

User · Answer

In the POSIX standard  which  bin sh is supposed to respect  the command is    a single dot   not source  The source command is a csh-ism that has been pulled into bash   Try     env name bin activate   Or if you must have non-POSIX bash-isms in your code  use    bin bash

[bash] Getting a 'source: not found' error when using source in a bash script

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