Calling external scripts
 

I would like to know the best method in order to call other scripts from another script. I have an antivirus program AntiVir that has its own startup/shutdown script, and I would like to call this from rc.local. How would I go about doing this? Thanks.

I suppose another option would be to place the startup/shutdown script for AntiVir in /etc/rc.d directory and making it executable. However, I just wanted to know for future reference how to call external scripts from another script.

Just as you would execute any program (a "script" is a shell program); invoke it by name with any arguments. If you look through the files in /etc/rc.d you'll notice that they're all shell programs (and, yes, you should be executing start up and shut down from /etc/rc.d if you want things running as daemons) and they execute other programs (be they shell or C or whatever) to start and stop services.

If the script you want to call is executable just call it by its' name. Otherwise you can use 'sh script_name'. There are other ways: source, '.' and exec.
Be sure to supply the full path to the script if it is not in your path.

Merely placing a script in /etc/rc.d and making it executable won't make Slackware run it automatically - you will still have to add it to rc.local.

A good way which also checks the executable status of your script would be to add these lines for a script called "rc.antivir:
Eric