Linux – zsh – differentiate between source ~/.zshrc and shell initially reading .zshrc

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Is there a command or environment variable that I can test for in my ~/.zshrc that that would differentiate between when I run source ~/.zshrc to update my configuration and when the shell reads ~/.zshrc as it's initialized?

So far my solution is to set a variable at the end of the ~/.zshrc and test for that variable on subsequent exectuion, but I'm curious if there's a cleaner way to directly get this information from the system or envrionment rather than hacking it together in a way that feels so fragile…. 

# somewhere in ~/.zshrc

if [[ -n $CONSOLE_ALREADY_RUNNING ]]; then
    echo "we've alredy loaded ~/.zshrc"
    echo "so you must be sourcing it"
fi

# many more lines of ~/.zshrc commands

# last line of ~/.zshrc
export CONSOLE_ALREADY_RUNNING=1

Seems like there should be some cleaner way to test if I'm just reloading via source /.zshrc or if .zshrc is being executed for a new instance of zsh that was just loaded into memory.

Best Answer

$ZSH_EVAL_CONTEXT is "toplevel" if you call the script from a shell. (for example ./script) $ZSH_EVAL_CONTEXT is "toplevel:file" if you source the script. (for example source script) $ZSH_EVAL_CONTEXT is "file" if it's run automatically as a runtime configuration. (like ~/.zshrc would be.)

Found the variable here.

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