I am aware of the bash internal command hash and how one can use hash -d or hash -r to forget remembered locations. Is there a way to instruct bash to automatically do this whenever it gets a "cache miss", i.e. when the remembered location goes away (no such file or directory) bash would clear the remembered location and try again?
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You can achieve this with the checkhash option:
shopt -s checkhash
checkhash
If set, bash checks that a command found in the hash table exists
before trying to execute it. If a hashed command no longer
exists, a normal path search is performed.
You can make that the option for all bash shells by putting it into the BASHOPTS environment variable:
BASHOPTS
A colon-separated list of enabled shell options.
Each word in the list is a valid argument for the
-s option to the shopt builtin command.
Setting this option may slightly slow down bash execution, since almost all of the time, the extra test is unnecessary. However, I wouldn't think that the cost of the test is significant.
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1The cost of the test is relevant (each disk access == latency), but you are comparing that cost to the cost of searching the entire PATH for the file. Seems cheap for providing the feature the requester wanted. – Slartibartfast Mar 27 '14 at 5:55
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Thanks, this is exactly what I wanted. I wonder if there are Linux dists with this option set as the default? – Gerry Lufwansa Mar 27 '14 at 6:17
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@GerryLufwansa: I doubt it, but it hardly seems like a deciding feature for a selecting a distro. It's just one line to add to your bash startup file (although figuring out which file can be a challenge with some distributions). – rici Mar 27 '14 at 18:50
