Linux – What Happens If You Edit a Script During Execution?

bashlinuxprocess-managementshell

I have a general question, which might be a result of misunderstanding of how processes are handled in Linux.

For my purposes I am going to define a 'script' as a snippet of bash code saved to a text file with execute permissions enabled for the current user.

I have a series of scripts that call each other in tandem. For simplicity's sake I'll call them scripts A, B, and C. Script A carries out a series of statements and then pauses, it then executes script B, then it pauses, then it executes script C. In other words, the series of steps is something like this:

Run Script A:

  1. Series of statements
  2. Pause
  3. Run Script B
  4. Pause
  5. Run Script C

I know from experience that if I run script A until the first pause, then make edits in script B, those edits are reflected in the execution of the code when I allow it to resume. Likewise if I make edits to script C while script A is still paused, then allow it to continue after saving changes, those changes are reflected in the execution of the code.

Here is the real question then, is there any way to edit Script A while it is still running? Or is editing impossible once its execution begins?

Best Answer

In Unix, most editors work by creating a new temporary file containing the edited contents. When the edited file is saved, the original file is deleted and the temporary file renamed to the original name. (There are, of course, various safeguards to prevent dataloss.) This is, for example, the style used by sed or perl when invoked with the -i ("in-place") flag, which is not really "in-place" at all. It should have been called "new place with old name".

This works well because unix assures (at least for local filesystems) that an opened file continues to exist until it is closed, even if it is "deleted" and a new file with the same name is created. (It's not coincidental that the unix system call to "delete" a file is actually called "unlink".) So, generally speaking, if a shell interpreter has some source file open, and you "edit" the file in the manner described above, the shell won't even see the changes since it still has the original file open.

[Note: as with all standards-based comments, the above is subject to multiple interpretations and there are various corner-cases, such as NFS. Pedants are welcome to fill the comments with exceptions.]

It is, of course, possible to modify files directly; it's just not very convenient for editing purposes, because while you can overwrite data in a file, you cannot delete or insert without shifting all following data, which would imply quite a lot of rewriting. Furthermore, while you were doing that shifting, the contents of the file would be unpredictable and processes which had the file open would suffer. In order to get away with this (as with database systems, for example), you need a sophisticated set of modification protocols and distributed locks; stuff which is well beyond the scope of a typical file editing utility.

So, if you want to edit a file while its being processed by a shell, you have two options:

  1. You can append to the file. This should always work.

  2. You can overwrite the file with new contents of exactly the same length. This may or may not work, depending on whether the shell has already read that part of the file or not. Since most file I/O involves read buffers, and since all the shells I know read an entire compound command before executing it, it is pretty unlikely that you can get away with this. It certainly wouldn't be reliable.

I don't know of any wording in the Posix standard which actually requires the possibility of appending to a script file while the file is being executed, so it might not work with every Posix compliant shell, much less with the current offering of almost- and sometimes-posix-compliant shells. So YMMV. But as far as I know, it does work reliably with bash.

As evidence, here's a "loop-free" implementation of the infamous 99 bottles of beer program in bash, which uses dd to overwrite and append (the overwriting is presumably safe because it substitutes the currently executing line, which is always the last line of the file, with a comment of exactly the same length; I did that so that the end result can be executed without the self-modifying behaviour.) 

#!/bin/bash
if [[ $1 == reset ]]; then
  printf "%s\n%-16s#\n" '####' 'next ${1:-99}' |
  dd if=/dev/stdin of=$0 seek=$(grep -bom1 ^#### $0 | cut -f1 -d:) bs=1 2>/dev/null
  exit
fi

step() {
  s=s
  one=one
  case $beer in
    2) beer=1; unset s;;
    1) beer="No more"; one=it;;
    "No more") beer=99; return 1;;
    *) ((--beer));;
  esac
}
next() {
  step ${beer:=$(($1+1))}
  refrain |
  dd if=/dev/stdin of=$0 seek=$(grep -bom1 ^next\  $0 | cut -f1 -d:) bs=1 conv=notrunc 2>/dev/null
}
refrain() {
  printf "%-17s\n" "# $beer bottles"
  echo echo ${beer:-No more} bottle$s of beer on the wall, ${beer:-No more} bottle$s of beer.
  if step; then
    echo echo Take $one down, pass it around, $beer bottle$s of beer on the wall.
    echo echo
    echo next abcdefghijkl
  else
    echo echo Go to the store, buy some more, $beer bottle$s of beer on the wall.
  fi
}
####
next ${1:-99}   #
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