Re: Nano

Hello there,

When invoking a command under nano (^R^X), the normal bash user scripts (like ~/.bashrc) are not referenced by default. This is due to how non-interactive shell invocation works; you can read the bash man page or related documentation for interactive vs non-interactive shell invocation for more details.

Anyway, in the case of how nano executes commands, the bash shell looks for an environment variable named $BASH_ENV to know where to load any needed variables or functions. Generally this variable is not set, just to keep these non-interactive shells as minimal and fast as possible. However, you can set this BASH_ENV value to whatever you want before you execute nano to make it load your custom functions:

BASH_ENV=$HOME/.bashrc  # or some other file if you prefer
export BASH_ENV

Unfortunately many Unix and Linux distributions set up the .bashrc to check for whether they are running interactively. This checks looks like this on my system:
  # If not running interactively, don't do anything
  case $- in
     *i*) ;;
       *) return;;
  esac

So you will have to put the BASH_ENV lines (and your custom functions) above this check in your .bashrc, ideally right at the top of the file. If all goes well, it should work.

If this becomes problematic, you should find that executing something like "bash -i -c myfunction" from within nano instead of just "myfunction" would work instead of doing the above.

I hope this helps.

------- Original Message -------
On Monday, February 21st, 2022 at 11:54 PM, BZ <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I'm BM. A very nice and polite guy.
>
> I often look at webpages in nano and then I need to copy the urls.
>
> So I was thinking I'll write a function for this and use it with the Nano Terminal (Ctrl+T). The function will just store urls into a list that I can edit later.
>
> However when I try to use my own custom made bash functions in Nano I get this error message: command not found.
>
> I can however run my own funcitons in bash as usual.
>
> Any way that I can use functions in the Nano Terminal so that I can conveniently save URLs to a file?
>
> BM