this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
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Also, do y'all call main() in the if block or do you just put the code you want to run in the if block?

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[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

Unix shell scripts are one of the few holdouts.

I don't know if this applies to other shells, but bash will not only execute your script line-by-line, it will also read it line-by-line. Which means that you can modify the behavior of a running script by editing lines that have not yet been executed*. It's absolutely bonkers, and I'm sure that it has caused more than one system failure, during upgrades.

* For example, if you run the following script

echo "hello"
sleep 5
echo "goodbye"

and then edit the third line before the 5 second sleep has elapsed, then the modified line will be executed.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

I have run into the problem of modifying a bash script while it is running.