Linux Tip of the Day — Environment variables, bash script execution in the context of your command-line window

I had to remind myself about this as I worked on Unix/Linux platform a long time ago and having been in Microsoft shops for many years did not help either :)

If you want your environment variables (being set up by another script) to be properly set up in the context of the window where you are running the script, you have to run the script with a dot and a space in front of it as shown in the screenshots below.

Screenshot of vim editor showing you the content of setup.sh script:

Executing the script in bash window and then verifying if an environment variable is set up:

Thank you for reading.

Almir Mustafic

Comments

Teaching kids the importance of information security — A simple fun example with encoding/decoding

Teaching kids about information security is very important today because the social network websites and applications are blurring the line between what should be shared securely and what not. Everybody is busy over-sharing the good, bad and ugly over the internet and in the process of doing that forgetting the basics of information security or never taking the time to learn it. Or is it that nobody is introducing these concepts in school? It is something that needs to be introduced in our education systems from early days. Do you remember the days when we used to send those short messages on a piece of paper in our classrooms? Some encoded those messages because you did not want another person in the middle to open it and understand what it says. How were those messages encoded? The simplest example is: You create a simple mapping for each letter and number in the alphabet. Then you encode your message and write it on a piece of paper. Then the person on the other end decodes...

Daylight saving time and A Software Engineering state of mind ?

You may be wondering what the Daylight saving time has to do with a software engineering state of mind. When thinking about writing this article, at first I thought to start with the following joke and I am: “ Did you know that the Daylight saving time was started because a software developer coded a function that does smart timezone and configurable calculations and then this developer created a problem to solve to use the algorithm; hence, the Daylight saving time was born. ” This is a joke, but on a more serious note , this brings me to a state of mind in software engineering that make this joke a reality to some degree. How many times did we find ourselves in situations where we learned something new in programming and we looked for ways to apply it at any cost? How many times did we see a cool new feature from a creator of a framework and we decided to use it even though that was not the right solution for the problem or maybe there was no problem to solve in the ...

Language of Software Engineers and scrum-master skills (quick thoughts)

Language of software engineers and skills of scrum-masters? All software developers speak the same language and that is pseudo-code :) However, there are still communication issues among software engineers specifically with other teams. That's where the role of great scrum-masters fits in. That great scrum-master does not necessarily need to be technical but he/she needs to have the skills of hearing roadblocks that engineers communicate in their technical language. I said "hearing" and hearing is not the same as listening. Listening is just a pre-requisite for hearing. Once you hear it, now you need to know how to action it and mobilize the right people. Coaching comes along with all of this, but that is a separate topic because it is also a responsibility of the tech manager. These skills separate great scrum-masters from others. Almir Mustafic P.S. Disclaimer: On any given day, I wear a hat of a solutions architect, engineer, scrum-master and tech manager.

Software Engineering Blogger

Search This Blog