Making scripts executable

Earlier in this module, you wrote the first script, and executed directly in the terminal using the sh <file_name> commanand. It becomes tedious to do this repeatedly and that leads us to making a script an executable.

You can make a script executable.

Making a script executable means that you dont have to compile it every time you want to run it which is what the sh <file_name> command does. Instead, you can make it executable once and run it directly from the terminal as many times as you want.

This is done by using the chmod u+x <file_name> command to compile and change the permissions of the file, allowing it to be executed as a program.

Consider the previous example

#!/bin/bash

echo "Hello, World"

To make this executable, do:

chmod u+x hello

Then to run it, do:

./hello

You should get the same result as before, but this is more efficient than typing sh hello every time.

As a final example, if our file name is delete_all and we want to make it executable and run it, we can do:

chmod u+x delete_all
./delete_all

That said, we're done here! Over to the next one.