I've written a built-in for bash which modifies the 'cd' command, a requirement for my software. Is there a way to actually distribute a loadable independently of bash itself? I'd ideally like to distribute just a drop in "additional feature" because I know people can be put off by patching and compiling their shell from source code.
I want to time how long a user is in a directory so I can determine where they want to be. It's this functionality: http://github.com/joelthelion/autojump/tree/master rewritten as a bash builtin, for performance issues. This implementation uses $PROMPT_COMMAND to work but I wanted something integrated.
It is unclear what you have modified but in any case, bash (like at least ksh93 which IIRC introduced the concept and zsh) supports, using the enable -f file name syntax, loading built-in functions as external dynamically loaded modules.
These modules being plain files can certainly be distributed independently, as long as you make sure they are compatible with the target version/architecture. This was already true 5 years ago when you asked this question.
One issue in your case is there seems to be no documented way to overload a internal built-in like cd by a dynamically loaded one while keeping the ability to access the former.
A simple workaround would be to implement your customized cd with a different name, say mycd, like this:
int mycd_builtin(list)
WORD_LIST *list;
{
int rv;
rv=cd_builtin(list);
if(rv == EXECUTION_SUCCESS) {
char wd[PATH_MAX+1];
getcwd(wd,sizeof(wd));
// do your custom stuff knowing the new working directory
...
}
return (rv);
}
then to use an alias, or better, a shell function for your customized version to be used instead of the regular one:
cd() {
mycd "$@"
}
As long as your customization doesn't affect the behavior of the standard command and thus doesn't risk breaking scripts using it, there is nothing wrong in your approach.