Bash – ~/.bashrc does not recognize export

A script can't push definitions up to you. You have to bring them in from the script by sourcing them. This is done by . /usr/bin/cdjs (if the script was in /usr/bin/cdjs). After that, you can use cdjs anytime.

Your co-worker may have been suggesting making the functions scripts instead. The cdjs function can be made a script, but in order for it to work, you have to source the script every time you use it, like this: . cd2js.

To do that, you would have a file /usr/bin/cd2js which is executable and contains:

$/bin/sh
cd /domains/"$1"/applications/j2ee-apps

If you frequently do a limited number of things in that directory, you might want to make several scripts that does those things for you.

So you can have a script like this:

#!/bin/sh

ls /domains/"$1"/applications/j2ee-apps/

And put it at /usr/bin/lsj2. Then you can just do lsj2 some-domain-1 anytime to see the contents.

You only need export for variables that should be "seen" by other programs which you launch in the shell, while the ones that are only used inside the shell itself don't need to be exported.

This is what the man page says:

The  supplied  names are marked for automatic export to the environ‐
ment of subsequently executed commands.  If the -f option is  given,
the  names  refer to functions.  If no names are given, or if the -p
option is supplied, a list of all names that are  exported  in  this
shell  is  printed.   The -n option causes the export property to be
removed from each name.  If a variable name is  followed  by  =word,
the  value  of  the variable is set to word.  export returns an exit
status of 0 unless an invalid option  is  encountered,  one  of  the
names  is  not a valid shell variable name, or -f is supplied with a
name that is not a function.

This can be demonstrated with the following:

$ MYVAR="value"
$ echo ${MYVAR}
value
$ echo 'echo ${MYVAR}' > echo.sh
$ chmod +x echo.sh
$ ./echo.sh

$ export MYVAR="value-exported"
$ ./echo.sh
value-exported

Explanation:

• I first set ${MYVAR} to be a Shell variable with MYVAR="value". Using echo I can echo the value of it because echo is part of the shell.
• Then I create echo.sh. That's a little script that basically does the same, it just echoes ${MYVAR}, but the difference is that it will run in a different process because it's a separate script.
• When calling echo.sh it outputs nothing, because the new process does not inherit ${MYVAR}
• Then I export ${MYVAR} into my environment with the export keyword
• When I now run the same echo.sh again, it echoes the content of ${MYVAR} because it gets it from the environment

So to answer your question:

It depends where a variable is going to be used, whether you have to export it or not.