Just a quick cheat sheet about how variables in Bash get inherited.

Result ∞

Here’s the result of a call to outer.sh (see below):

Call
-------
From Outer (export):    yes
From Outer (no export):
From Inner (export):
From Inner (no export):

Source
-------
From Outer (export):    yes
From Outer (no export): yes
From Inner (export):    yes
From Inner (no export): yes

Test ∞

The test consists of two files: outer.sh and inner.sh.

outer.sh is called by the user and internally calls inner.sh – once directly and once with source.

Contents of outer.sh:

#!/bin/bash

export FROM_OUTER_EXPORT="yes"
FROM_OUTER_NO_EXPORT="yes"

echo "Call"
echo "-------"
./inner.sh
echo "From Inner (export):    $FROM_INNER_EXPORT"
echo "From Inner (no export): $FROM_INNER_NO_EXPORT"

echo 
echo "Source"
echo "-------"
source ./inner.sh
echo "From Inner (export):    $FROM_INNER_EXPORT"
echo "From Inner (no export): $FROM_INNER_NO_EXPORT"

Contents of inner.sh:

#!/bin/bash

echo "From Outer (export):    $FROM_OUTER_EXPORT"
echo "From Outer (no export): $FROM_OUTER_NO_EXPORT"

export FROM_INNER_EXPORT="yes"
FROM_INNER_NO_EXPORT="yes"

I had it happened a couple of times now that Mercurial on Windows would give me this error:

skipping unreadable pattern file ‘D:\Documents\Programming\YourProject\’: No such file or directory

This message is strange because the path actually exits.

After some searching I found the solution in the Mercurial bug tracker:

Bug 5325 – “skipping unreadable pattern file” by empty ui.ignore

The title already suggests the solution. There’s an empty ignore= entry in the global mercurial.ini file.

Removing this entry solves the problem.

The file is located here:

C:\Users\<YourUserName>\mercurial.ini

Note: It seems this “problem” is caused by SourceTree.

Are you still stuck with Windows 8.1 or earlier? Then, if you want to use Docker, you have to use the Docker Toolbox.

Docker Toolbox comes with its own “shell” called Docker Quickstart Terminal. It uses Windows’ own command window – which is pretty limited.

As I explored in Command Line Replacement For Windows, there are alternatives.

To be able to interact with Docker Toolbox in these alternative command line tools, you can create a simple batch file that drops you into the same Docker shell as the “Docker Quickstart Terminal”:

@echo off
setlocal
cd /D %DOCKER_TOOLBOX_INSTALL_PATH%
"%GIT_INSTALL_ROOT%\bin\bash.exe" --login -i "%DOCKER_TOOLBOX_INSTALL_PATH%\start.sh"

Even though Windows has a command line, this command line is very limited when compared to the ones available on Mac or Linux.

Fortunately, there are (free) alternatives out there. In this article we’ll be looking at three of them: ConsoleZ, ConEmu, and Cmder

At the end of the day, we’re looking for the best tool. So I’ve assembled a comparison chart for these three tools to find out which one is the best for me and you.

Read more →

As developers, we sometimes want to quickly test some software. Instead of installing it directly on our developer machine, it’s better to install it in a virtual machine (VM). But if you don’t have a VM ready, setting one up usally takes a lot of time – and there goes your productivity.

Fortunately, there is a solution: Vagrant

Vagrant is a free tool that lets you quickly spin-up fresh VMs out of thin air. It can even spin-up multiple VMs at the same time.

This article is step by step tutorial for getting from nothing to a multi-VM setup where the VMs can talk to each other.

Read more →