I have a bunch of shell/ruby scripts in a directory that I include into my PATH variable. The scripts live there because I don’t have a better location to put them. That’s fine when scripts are general enough to be used anywhere.
Some scripts are not so general and are meant to interact only with a few specific files and directories.
Putting things in perspective: this is a discussion about global variables and local variables when it comes to Bash. You want your variables to be scoped only that was is needed and not more.
Here’s an insight:
Include a
.localdirectory in your PATH.
For example:
forgetful, a project I maintain that implements the Supermemo algorithm, takes CSV files as input. I could use a spreadsheet manipulate these files, but I prefer to use Vim and a bunch of unixy scripts to do what I want. In the directory where I keep my CSV files, I created a subdirectory called .local (could be called anything). When I’m in the directory, Bash will include the .local subdirectory when looking for executables … in essence, I get my “local” executables.
Notice how there’s a Rakefile in that directory? I think that’s a workaround that a lot of people end up using. I’ll probably strip out most of what the Rakefile is doing and shove it to the .local directory.
[...] Finally, the relative path .local is an interesting hack. It allows for directory-specific binaries. This solves the “I just use this script when I’m in that directory” problem. This trick is discussed in this blog post. [...]