Dash doesn't understand "source"

[Norm Walsh]

Dash claims to be /bin/bash. It isn't. That's evil. But nevermind...

My .profile includes the following lines:

if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then
  source ~/.bashrc
fi

To which dash (which is running because Xsession uses /bin/sh and ...) responds:

"source" not found.

The rest of my session naturally goes pear shaped.

Grrrr....

[Gérard Bigot (gerard-bigot)]

Replace source with a simple '.' without the '

G.

On 10/10/06, Norm Walsh <email address hidden> wrote:
>
> Public bug reported:
>
> Dash claims to be /bin/bash. It isn't. That's evil. But nevermind...
>
> My .profile includes the following lines:
>
> if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then
> source ~/.bashrc
> fi
>
> To which dash (which is running because Xsession uses /bin/sh and ...)
> responds:
>
> "source" not found.
>
> The rest of my session naturally goes pear shaped.
>
> Grrrr....
>
> ** Affects: dash (Ubuntu)
> Importance: Undecided
> Status: Unconfirmed
>
> --
> Dash doesn't understand "source"
> https://launchpad.net/bugs/65046
>
> --
> ubuntu-bugs mailing list
> <email address hidden>
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
>

[Norm Walsh (ndw)]

Thanks for the suggestion. I did try that. I got some sort of syntax error, so I still think there's something broken about dash in this area.

[Micah Cowan (micahcowan)]

The word "source" is a bash extension: the portable version is the dot (".") command.

Please test with the minimally failing example. For instance, with an empty or trivial .bashrc file, does:

if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]
then
    . ~/.bashrc
fi

fail? If not, the bug would seem to be other than the one you've described. If so, please include the exact error message you received.

Also, in what way does dash "claim to be /bin/bash"? If you're referring to the contents of the $SHELL environment variable, you can't blame dash for that: while it's commonly misinterpreted to mean the currently running shell, it actually is set by login (and some shells) to be the value of the user's login shell, as specified by /etc/passwd. That is, if your login shell is /bin/tcsh, and SHELL is currently unset, and you run bash, bash will set SHELL to /bin/tcsh (and not /bin/bash). Dash may possibly do the same: or it may be that it was already set by a parent process.

[Norm Walsh (ndw)]

My bad. Using "." did work, the error was caused by something *in* my .bashrc, I simply got confused by the error message. Sorry about that.

As for $SHELL, I stand corrected.

The transition from bash to dash caused a regression (in that my previously working login stopped working), but perhaps the bugs are all mine.

[Micah Cowan (micahcowan)]

In that case, I'll go ahead and close out this bug. Please do continue to report any problems that you find!