Terminal Closes When I Source My Script (Run with Dot at the Start)

Terminal closes when I source my script (run with dot at the start)

Replace all exit with return.
return inside a sourced script will even work with exit codes:

$ . <(echo "echo before; return 0; echo after")
before
$ echo $?
0
$ . <(echo "echo before; return 7; echo after")
before
$ echo $?
7

bash: exit from sourced script

It seems there could be 2 parts to this. The first is to know when you're executing in a sourced script instead of an executed one. That can be found in this answer, and for bash they suggest:

[[ "$0" != "$BASH_SOURCE" ]] && sourced=1 || sourced=0

to tell whether or not you are being sourced.

If you are being sourced, you'd want to use return instead of exit.

You could store that function in a variable with something like

if [[ $sourced -eq 1 ]]; then
    ret=return
else
    ret=exit
fi

and then when you want to use the appropriate one you'd just use

$ret 1

Shell script closes iterm2 on exit

Using:

. myscript.sh

You are actually running the script in the existing shell or "sourcing" the script. With exit at the end of the script, this means that the terminal session will also exit

Alternatively:

./myscript.sh

or

bash myscript.sh

Will run the script in a separate bash shell and stop the terminal session from exiting.

unix command line execute with . (dot) vs. without

. name sources the file called name into the current shell. So if a file contains this

A=hello

Then if you sources that, afterwards you can refer to a variable called A which will contain hello. But if you execute the file (given proper execution rights and #!/interpreterline), then such things won't work, since the variable and other things that script sets will only affects its subshell it is run in.

Sourcing a binary file will not make any sense: Shell wouldn't know how to interpret the binary stuff (remember it inserts the things appearing in that file into the current shell - much like the good old #include <file> mechanism in C). Example:

head -c 10 /dev/urandom > foo.sh; . foo.sh # don't do this at home!
bash: �ǻD$�/�: file or directory not found

Executing a binary file, however, does make a lot of sense, of course. So normally you want to just name the file you want to execute, and in special cases, like the A=hello case above, you want to source a file.

How do I get the directory where a Bash script is located from within the script itself?

#!/usr/bin/env bash

SCRIPT_DIR=$( cd -- "$( dirname -- "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" )" &> /dev/null && pwd )

is a useful one-liner which will give you the full directory name of the script no matter where it is being called from.

It will work as long as the last component of the path used to find the script is not a symlink (directory links are OK). If you also want to resolve any links to the script itself, you need a multi-line solution:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

SOURCE=${BASH_SOURCE[0]}
while [ -L "$SOURCE" ]; do # resolve $SOURCE until the file is no longer a symlink
  DIR=$( cd -P "$( dirname "$SOURCE" )" >/dev/null 2>&1 && pwd )
  SOURCE=$(readlink "$SOURCE")
  [[ $SOURCE != /* ]] && SOURCE=$DIR/$SOURCE # if $SOURCE was a relative symlink, we need to resolve it relative to the path where the symlink file was located
done
DIR=$( cd -P "$( dirname "$SOURCE" )" >/dev/null 2>&1 && pwd )

This last one will work with any combination of aliases, source, bash -c, symlinks, etc.

Beware: if you cd to a different directory before running this snippet, the result may be incorrect!

Also, watch out for $CDPATH gotchas, and stderr output side effects if the user has smartly overridden cd to redirect output to stderr instead (including escape sequences, such as when calling update_terminal_cwd >&2 on Mac). Adding >/dev/null 2>&1 at the end of your cd command will take care of both possibilities.

To understand how it works, try running this more verbose form:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

SOURCE=${BASH_SOURCE[0]}
while [ -L "$SOURCE" ]; do # resolve $SOURCE until the file is no longer a symlink
  TARGET=$(readlink "$SOURCE")
  if [[ $TARGET == /* ]]; then
    echo "SOURCE '$SOURCE' is an absolute symlink to '$TARGET'"
    SOURCE=$TARGET
  else
    DIR=$( dirname "$SOURCE" )
    echo "SOURCE '$SOURCE' is a relative symlink to '$TARGET' (relative to '$DIR')"
    SOURCE=$DIR/$TARGET # if $SOURCE was a relative symlink, we need to resolve it relative to the path where the symlink file was located
  fi
done
echo "SOURCE is '$SOURCE'"
RDIR=$( dirname "$SOURCE" )
DIR=$( cd -P "$( dirname "$SOURCE" )" >/dev/null 2>&1 && pwd )
if [ "$DIR" != "$RDIR" ]; then
  echo "DIR '$RDIR' resolves to '$DIR'"
fi
echo "DIR is '$DIR'"

And it will print something like:

SOURCE './scriptdir.sh' is a relative symlink to 'sym2/scriptdir.sh' (relative to '.')
SOURCE is './sym2/scriptdir.sh'
DIR './sym2' resolves to '/home/ubuntu/dotfiles/fo fo/real/real1/real2'
DIR is '/home/ubuntu/dotfiles/fo fo/real/real1/real2'

Any way to exit bash script, but not quitting the terminal

The "problem" really is that you're sourcing and not executing the script. When you source a file, its contents will be executed in the current shell, instead of spawning a subshell. So everything, including exit, will affect the current shell.

Instead of using exit, you will want to use return.

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