When using the cd command in a shell script, I can move down through several directories just fine, do some creation of some folders, and then exit the script. However, I would like to remain at the lowest level of the directory when I exit the script but for some reason I always return to the directory from which I started. I have tried several variations of cd command and none of them "stick" at the exit level.

#!/bin/bash
cd dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4
(make some files in dir4)
(try to stay at dir4 level in the path)
exit

OK, so now I have come out of the editor (gedit) in this case, and chmod and so forth, run the script, but I always find my place in the path where I created the script.

Hope this is coherent enough to follow. Does anyone know what I am trying to do and is this realistic?

Thanks

The script runs as a child process of the command shell it is called from and all changes it makes to its process environment -- including the current directory -- are lost when it exits.

You can work around this limitation by having the script write its final directory (and nothing else while it is running) to stdout and capture it in the calling script like this:

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Yes coherent and also the correct behaviour. Remember that executing a script starts a subshell and at no time does the subshell affect the parent (for lots of good reasons you can look up )

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Thanks to all that have replied. Will go try this out. May be Monday before this meal is fully digested but I get the meaning of the replies, and understand the lingo, eg: child process, etc.

You can also run your script in the current shell, instead of child shell like

but be careful as this will overide all variables.
At the end unset all of the variables you previously created to not make a mess.

A better way to understand it is that (to the best of my knowledge) no process can directly affect the environment of another. They are all isolated.

When one process starts another, the "child" takes on a copy of the the parent environment, or at least the values that are exported. But after initialization is complete, no outside process can change anything directly, or vice-versa. Any changes to a process' environment must be made from within that process.

Depending on your final purposes, you might want to consider converting your script into a function in the main shell. Since the function runs in the current environment, any final values will remain after it exits.

http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashGuide...ands#Functions