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How to Run a Bash Script
Running a bash script is easy, but it does take a few steps and it’s important to do them in the right order. In this post, we’ll go through the steps to ensure that your script will run correctly 😉
The second step is to make sure that your script file is executable. In Linux and macOS, you can check if a file is executable by running the
ls -l
command and then looking for an x in the permissions column. The example below shows the difference:
$ ls -l *.sh
-rwxrwxr-x 1 frank frank 43 mei 29 16:30 hello.sh
-rw-rw-r-- 1 frank frank 8192 jul 1 19:41 not-executable.sh
If it isn’t executable, run the following command in Terminal.
chmod +x script.sh
To start a script you write:
./script.sh
I can write a shell script when I need to, but then continue working in Python or Perl or C++ or whatever real programming language I'm most comfortable with at the time (these days mostly C++).
For example, one of my recent side projects involved crunching data from a database, working with various embedded systems and more. Shell is not the right tool for that kind of application.
Bash is more suited for when you write a lot of commands in the shell anyway and want to automate that.