Possible to invoke a justfile as a shebang script via symbolic link ?

[simonmichael]

Thanks for just! I have notes/Justfile, with executable permission and a shebang line like

#!/usr/bin/env just -f

This works if I run it directly as notes/Justfile, but not if I symlink it to a more convenient name like note in PATH and then run note. In that case it ignores its own recipes and uses recipes from another justfile in a parent directory. I guess just's justfile finding logic is defeated by the unusual name.

Is there way to make this work currently, and does anyone have ideas for how it could be made more robust ?

[simonmichael]

This is one workaround:

#!/usr/bin/env JUST_JUSTFILE=/Users/simon/notes/Justfile just -f

[simonmichael]

Another:

#!/usr/bin/env just -f
set working-directory := '/Users/simon/notes'
...

[laniakea64]

It's expected that this would be necessary. When you symlink your justfile into a directory on $PATH, the automatically-determined justfile_directory() becomes the directory in $PATH containing the symlink.

That said, I still don't understand the original issue:

it ignores its own recipes and uses recipes from another justfile in a parent directory. I guess just's justfile finding logic is defeated by the unusual name.

This I can't reproduce. With the following justfile symlinked to ~/bin/note:

#!/usr/bin/env -S just -f

main: d
	echo 'main'
	pwd

d:
	echo 'd'
	pwd

All of note, note main, and note d work fine and work completely as expected for me:

• All pwd calls return the full path of ~/bin
• Both note and note main are able to find the d recipe
• Continues to work this way even when run in a directory containing a different justfile with its own just d recipe - that justfile is not used, it continues to use the d recipe from the note justfile as expected.

Could you please share more details of your justfile and the recipes that aren't working?

[simonmichael]

Perhaps it is a bug though, that (without these workarounds) the file specified explicitly with -f is not used ?

[casey]

I'm not actually able to reproduce this. Check out this terminal session:

$ mkdir foo
$ vim foo/justfile
$ chmod +x foo/justfile
$ ./foo/justfile
echo hello
hello
$ ln -s `pwd`/foo/justfile hello
$ ./hello
echo hello
hello

I'm using symlinks with an absolute path on macOS.