Get the name of the caller script in bash script

Question

Let\'s assume I have 3 shell scripts:

script_1.sh

#!/bin/bash
./script_3.sh

script_2.sh

Answer 1

Couple of useful files things kept in /proc/$PPID here

• /proc/*some_process_id*/exe A symlink to the last executed command under *some_process_id*
• /proc/*some_process_id*/cmdline A file containing the last executed command under *some_process_id* and null-byte separated arguments

So a slight simplification.

sed 's/\x0/ /g' "/proc/$PPID/cmdline"

Answer 2

Declare this:

PARENT_NAME=`ps -ocomm --no-header $PPID`

Thus you'll get a nice variable $PARENT_NAME that holds the parent's name.

Answer 3

You could pass in a variable to script_3.sh to determine how to respond...

script_1.sh

#!/bin/bash
./script_3.sh script1

script_2.sh

#!/bin/bash
./script_3.sh script2

script_3.sh

#!/bin/bash
if [ $1 == 'script1' ] ; then
  echo "we were called from script1!"
elsif [ $1 == 'script2' ] ; then
  echo "we were called from script2!"
fi

Answer 4

The $PPID variable holds the parent process ID. So you could parse the output from ps to get the command.

#!/bin/bash
PARENT_COMMAND=$(ps $PPID | tail -n 1 | awk "{print \$5}")

Answer 5

Based on @J.L.answer, with more in depth explanations (the only one command that works for me (linux)) :

cat /proc/$PPID/comm

gives you the name of the command of the parent pid

If you prefer the command with all options, then :

cat /proc/$PPID/cmdline

explanations :

• $PPID is defined by the shell, it's the pid of the parent processes
• in /proc/, you have some dirs with the pid of each process (linux). Then, if you cat /proc/$PPID/comm, you echo the command name of the PID

Check man proc

Answer 6

In case you are sourceing instead of calling/executing the script there is no new process forked and thus the solutions with ps won't work reliably.

Use bash built-in caller in that case.

$ cat h.sh 
#! /bin/bash 
function warn_me() { 
    echo "$@" 
    caller 
} 
$ cat g.sh 
#!/bin/bash 
source h.sh 
warn_me "Error: You didn't do something" 
$ . g.sh 
Error: You didn't do something 3 
g.sh
$

Source