Loading shell functions
Manual search: Sometimes only a function name is known and one has
to find the corresponding source file. One could do this by iterating over
the directories in $PATH and comparing all file names in each
directory with the function name. However, this is rather ineffective, as
normally only few directories in $PATH contain function files. In
ksh there is an special variable FPATH which holds only
directories containing functions. The shell uses it for function
autoloading (see below). Obviously it is more efficient to iterate over
$FPATH than over $PATH, and it makes sense
to use the scheme in bash as well. The variable has no
special meaning there, but that doesn't matter.
I recommend a setup in both shells similar
to this example:
export FPATH=/usr/share/functions/general:/usr/meier/funcs"
PATH+=":$FPATH" IFS=:; for dir in ${FPATH:=$PATH}; do ...$FPATH is used for function lookup, if set,
$PATH otherwise. That's what happens in
vared and in the following little
function loadfunc. The function is called with
a list of function names and tries to find and load all of them.
If called with -a, all functions reachable via
$FPATH are loaded.
|
Deutsche Version
Loading functions