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up vote 4 down vote favorite

I want to somehow enter a different bash shell with some altered environment variables.

For example, if I run script bfin.sh and it contains something like 

export PATH=/home/me/bfin2012:$PATH

I want it to create a bash shell with this changed variable. How to do this?

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3 Answers 3

up vote 5 down vote

To load environment variables you've put into a file, you can use the source command. e.g.

See current path:

 > echo $PATH
 /bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin

File with custom environment settings..

 > cat exports
 export PATH="/home/me/bfin2012:$PATH"
 export ...

Load custom environment

 > source exports

Confirm changes.

 > env | grep '^PATH'
 PATH=/home/me/bin2012:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin
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up vote 1 down vote

You've already set the variable and exported the set variable. If you want to enter a new bash shell at this point with that variable present, you just run:

bash

Note that the new shell's startup procedure might end up overwriting your variable, though! This could happen in .bashrc, for example.

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up vote 0 down vote

Either change your script to end with exec bash, or run

sh -c '. bfin.sh; exec bash'

If you want to change the environment of the current shell, run

. bfin.sh

The . (dot or period) builtin executes the command from the specified script inside the same shell environment, like a function.

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