How to run .sh file in Mac Terminal

A file with .sh extension is a Bash script that you can execute using the Mac Terminal. Say you have a file script.sh and you want to execute it, follow the below steps.

Step 1: Make sure the sh file has execute permissions

By default the sh file will not have execute permissions, we can check that using the ls command.

% ls -l script.sh 
-rw-r--r--  1 c2ctech  staff  36 Sep  6 12:11 script.sh

If we try to run the sh script without execution permission we will get an error.

% ./script.sh

zsh: permission denied: ./script.sh

So before we can execute the script we need to add execute permissions using the command chmod +x

Example:

chmod +x script.sh

Step 2: Running the .sh script file

We can run the sh file by adding a ./ before the script file name.

Example:

./script.sh

If you are providing an absolute path for the file, you can do that as follows,

/Users/c2ctechtv/Desktop/script.sh

This is not an AI-generated article but is demonstrated by a human on an M1 Mac running macOS Sonoma 14.0.

Please support independent contributors like Code2care by donating a coffee.

Buy me a coffee!