I mean, whatever works for you, obviously - there's no true way - but this sounds fragile - and perhaps more importantly - like working against the grain of she

I mean, whatever works for you, obviously - there's no true way - but this sounds fragile - and perhaps more importantly - like working against the grain of shell/Unix. I would generally say that state belongs in environment variables (and arguments) - and/or files/input streams. Not partially hard-coded in partial scripts. I suppose I could see a "framework" like: ./projX/setup ./projX/job1 ./projX/job2 ./projX/cleanup But I'd still prefer setup and friends to accept a path (not PATH) as first argument or whatever. Rather than assuming a relative path. Maybe even factor most of this into something that could live under /opt/bin or whatever. Especially for cron I'd rather see: /opt/projX/scripts/mangle /opt/projX Rather than just the first part with an implicit argument of "parent of containing folder".