Re: exec

[Ray Andrews <rayandrews@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2024-06-03 07:17, Mark J. Reed wrote:

The exec builtin replaces the running shell with whatever program you run.  The point is to avoid clogging the process table with shells that are just hanging out waiting to do nothing but exit as soon as their child process finishes.

    I get that.

In your case, the script exists to set things up in the environment and then run xfce4-session; there's nothing for it to do after xfce4-session completes, so it uses exec to tidy up.

    Sure.  But then what? I understand that if a script or function has
    nothing more to do, it may as well pre-kill itself. But the
    difference is that 'exec' kills the entire terminal, it doesn't just
    return to the prompt in a more efficient way -- which would be easy
    to understand, as above.  exec seems to pull the rug out from under
    itself, not just end a script more efficiently.  In my case, from
    what I've heard control seems to pass to dbus.  Mind, if dbus called
    the script then that's what one might expect.