Running a shell script in *nix

Posted by Ben on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Ben
Published on 2009-11-04T19:07:57Z Indexed on 2012/04/03 23:31 UTC
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shell

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scripting

Bit of a newb using *nix (I'm actually using a bash shell in OS X 10.5) and I wondered what the probably very simple answer is to this...

When I write a script (called, say, my_script) and I've saved it to the current directory, why do I have to put a period and a forward slash in front of its name to run it? Like this:

./my_script

Can't the shell tell that I want to run it from the current directory? Windows seems to handle that situation.

Cheers Ben

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