This blog is made with Jekyll which requires some basic formatting of blog post files to display them properly. Before starting this post, I wrote a little bash script that creates a blank, pre-formatted “post” file and adds the necessary headers for Jekyll to display it. It’s super basic but it was a quick way for me to test the bash scripting skills I’ve been working on.

(if curious check out the script here)

As part of this exercise I decided to try sourcing a file into my script.
Basically this means include some external code that can be run within the script. This is done in nodeJS and Java with import and Ruby with require

With bash, it is source:

source scripts/make-post-header.sh

with the scripts/make-post-header.sh providing the relative path to the file.

The most interesting part for me was that while the main script required a chmod +x command be run on it to make it executable, the source file being brought in did not require a change mode and it still worked within the script.