What does $* mean in bash scripting?
I tried to search on google for it, but I found only about $0, $1 and so on.
From the man page:
* Expands to the positional parameters, starting from one. When the expansion occurs within double quotes, it expands to a single
word with the value of each parameter separated by the first character of the IFS special variable. That is, "$*" is equivalent
to "$1c$2c...", where c is the first character of the value of the IFS variable. If IFS is unset, the parameters are separated
by spaces. If IFS is null, the parameters are joined without intervening separators.
So it is equivalent to all the positional parameters, with slightly different semantics depending on whether or not it is in quotes.
See this page:
http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/internalvariables.html#IFSEMPTY
The behavior of $* and $# when $IFS is empty depends
+ on which Bash or sh version being run.
It is therefore inadvisable to depend on this "feature" in a script.
It's all the arguments passed to the script, except split by word. You almost always want to use "$#" instead. And it's all in the bash(1) man page.
Its the list of arguments supplied on the command line to the script .$0 will be the script name.
It's a space separated string of all arguments. For example, if $1 is "hello" and $2 is "world", then $* is "hello world". (Unless $IFS is set; then it's an $IFS separated string.)
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If you see $ in prefix with anything , it means its a variable. The value of the variable is used.
Example:
count=100
echo $count
echo "Count Value = $count"
Output of the above script:
100
Count Value = 100
As an independent command it doesn't have any significance in bash scripting.
But, as per usage in commands, it's used to indicate common operation on files / folders with some common traits.
and with grep used to represent zero or more common traits in a command.
Related
I'm trying to create function that will print message bound to variable in certain color. The message variable is passed as argument of this function. The problem is that I'm getting only text up to first space (only first word of message). My script looks like this:
#!/usr/bash
lbGREEN='\e[1;92m'
NC='\e[0m'
normalMessage="Everything fine"
echo_message() {
echo -e ${lbGREEN}$1${NC}
}
echo_message $normalMessage
My output is:
Everything
As Inian pointed out in comments, your problem is unquoted variable expansion
echo_message $normalMessage
becomes
echo_message Everything fine
once the variable expands, meaning that each word of your input string is getting read in as a separate argument. When this happens $1=Everything and $2=fine.
This is fixed by double-quoting your variable, which allows expansion, but will mean the result of the expansion will still be read as one argument.
echo_message "$normalMessage"
becomes
echo_message "Everything fine"
Like this $1=Everything fine
In the future, I recommend using https://www.shellcheck.net/, or the CLI version of shellcheck, it will highlight all kinds of common bash gotcha's, included unquoted expansion.
For me, I had to change the header for "#!/bin/bash", but apparently that is not the problem for you.
In your echo you are printing only the first word with the $1, if you change it to $2 you will print the second word (parameter) and so on.
You can pass the name inside quotes or print all the parameters with $#
Solution 1 (with $#):
lbGREEN='\e[1;92m'
NC='\e[0m'
normalMessage="Everything fine"
echo_message() {
echo -e ${lbGREEN}$#${NC}
}
echo_message $normalMessage
Solution 2 (with quotes):
lbGREEN='\e[1;92m'
NC='\e[0m'
normalMessage="Everything fine"
echo_message() {
echo -e ${lbGREEN}$1${NC}
}
echo_message "$normalMessage"
You should get a look to https://stackoverflow.com/a/6212408/1428602
IMHO, $1 only return the 1st word, so you have to use a loop or try with $*
You've got the quoting wrong.
If you want to simulate the behaviour of echo, your function should accept multiple parameters, and print them all. Currently it's only evaluating the first parameter, so I suggest using $* instead. You also need to enclose the argument in double quotes to protect any special characters:
echo_message() {
echo -e "${lbGREEN}$*${NC}"
}
The special variable $* expands to all the arguments, separated by spaces (or more accurately, the first character of $IFS, which is usually a space character). Note that you almost always want "$#" instead of "$*", and this is one of the rare occasions where the latter is also correct, though with slightly different semantics if IFS is set to a non-standard value.
Now the function supports multiple arguments, and prints them all in green, separated by spaces. However, I would recommend that you also quote the argument when calling the function:
echo_message "$normalMessage"
While spaces in $normalMessage will now be treated correctly, other special characters like ! will still require the quotes.
This question already has answers here:
I just assigned a variable, but echo $variable shows something else
(7 answers)
Closed 7 years ago.
I would like to store the output of printf with formatting in a variable, but it strips off the formatting for some reason.
This is the correct output
$ printf "%-40s %8s %9s %7s" "File system" "Free" "Refquota" "Free %"
File system Free Refquota Free
And now the formatting is gone
$ A=$(printf "%-40s %8s %9s %7s" "File system" "Free" "Refquota" "Free %")
$ echo $A
File system Free Refquota Free %
echo will print each of it's arguments in order, separated by one space. You are passing a bunch of different arguments to echo.
The simple solution is to quote $A:
A=$(printf "%-40s %8s %9s %7s" "File system" "Free" "Refquota" "Free %")
echo "$A"
This is because you are not quoting the variable. If you do, the format will show perfectly:
echo "$A" #although $a would be best, uppercase vars are not good practise
That is, your var=$(printf ) approach is completely fine, you just fail to echo properly.
You may want to know why. Find it in Why does my shell script choke on whitespace or other special characters?
Why do I need to write "$foo"? What happens without the quotes?
$foo does not mean “take the value of the variable foo”. It means
something much more complex:
First, take the value of the variable. * Field splitting: treat
that value as a whitespace-separated list of fields, and build the
resulting list. For example, if the variable contains foo * bar
then the result of this step is the 3-element list foo, *, bar.
Filename generation: treat each field as a glob, i.e. as a wildcard pattern, and replace it by the list of file names that match this
pattern. If the pattern doesn't match any files, it is left
unmodified. In our example, this results in the list containing foo,
following by the list of files in the current directory, and finally
bar. If the current directory is empty, the result is foo, *,
bar.
Note that the result is a list of strings. There are two contexts in
shell syntax: list context and string context. Field splitting and
filename generation only happen in list context, but that's most of
the time. Double quotes delimit a string context: the whole
double-quoted string is a single string, not to be split. (Exception:
"$#" to expand to the list of positional parameters, e.g. "$# is
equivalent to "$1" "$2" "$3" if there are three positional
parameters. See What is the difference between $* and $#?)
The same happens to command substitution with $(foo) or with
`foo`. On a side note, don't use `foo`: its quoting rules are
weird and non-portable, and all modern shells support $(foo) which
is absolutely equivalent except for having intuitive quoting rules.
The output of arithmetic substitution also undergoes the same
expansions, but that isn't normally a concern as it only contains
non-expandable characters (assuming IFS doesn't contain digits or
-).
See When is double-quoting necessary? for more details about the
cases when you can leave out the quotes.
Unless you mean for all this rigmarole to happen, just remember to
always use double quotes around variable and command substitutions. Do
take care: leaving out the quotes can lead not just to errors but to
security
holes.
I wrote a little script in bash, but it only worked when I stored the string as a variable, and I'd like to know why. Here's the summary:
When I use the string itself, bash treats it as a single entity
for word in "this is a sentence"; do
echo $word
done
# => this is a sentence
If I save the exact same string into a variable, bash iterates over the words
sentence="this is a sentence"
for word in $sentence; do
echo $word
done
# => this
# is
# a
# sentence
Why are these being treated differently?
Is there a simple way to iterate through the words in the string without first saving the string as a variable?
The quotes tell bash to treat a thing in quotes as a single parameter in a parameter list at the time the expression is evaluated. The quotes (unless protected with \ or ') are removed.
echo "" # prints newlines, no quotes
echo '""' # Print ""
export X='""'
env | grep X # X contains ""
export X=""
env | grep X # X is empty
When you use a variable, bash unpacks it as is (i.e. as if you typed the variable's contents in the variable's place). For a for-loop bash determines the list-elements to iterate over by separating the for-loop's parameters by whitespace, but treating (as always) quote-protected items a single parameter/list-element. Your variable contained no quotes -- items are treated as separate parameters.
As comments suggested, quotes are important. A for loop will step through a list of values terminated by a semicolon, and that list is a set of strings. Unquoted strings are delimited usually by whitespace. Whitespace inside a quoted string does not separate the string from its brethren, it's simply part of the quoted string. There's some truly excellent documentation about quotes in bash at http://mywiki.wooledge.org/Quotes . Read it. Read it now. You'll find a part that says
The quotes are not actually passed along to the command. They are removed by the shell (this process is cleverly called "quote removal").
To step through the words in a sentence that's stored in a variable (if I've inferred your question correctly), you could perhaps use an array to separate the words by whitespace:
#!/bin/bash
sentence="this is a sentence"
IFS=" " read -a words <<< "$sentence"
for word in "${words[#]}"; do
echo "$word"
done
In bash, read -a will divide a string by $IFS and place the divided parts into elements of the array. See http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashGuide/Arrays for more information about how bash arrays work.
If you want more details in pursuit of a specific problem, you might want to tell us what the problem is, or risk making this an XY problem.
In the assignment
sentence="this is a sentence"
there are no unquoted spaces, so everything to the right of the = is treated as a single word. (Something like sentence=this is a sentence would be parsed as a single assignment sentence=this followed by an attempt to run a program called is.) As a result, the value of sentences is a sequence of 18 characters. It is identical to
sentence=this\ is\ a\ sentence
because again, there are no unquoted spaces.
For the same reason
for word in "this is a sentence"; do
echo $word
done
has word being set to each word in the following sequence, which only contains a single word because there are no unquoted spaces.
The key difference with your other loop is that parameter expansions are subject to word-splitting after the fact. The loop
for word in $sentence; do
echo $word
done
after parameter expansion looks like
for word in this is a sentence; do
echo $word
done
so now word is set to each of the 4 words in the list following the in keyword.
It's not clear what you are actually asking at the end of your question, but the preceding is legal code. There is no requirement that a string be placed in quotes in bash; quotes do not define something as a string value, but simply escape every character that appears within the quotes. "foo" and \f\o\o are the same thing in shell.
Quoting turns any string into a single unit. If you lose the quotes, everything should be fine.
I am running a script with: ./some_script arg1 arg2 "multiple words arg3" arg4. I want to explode arguments ($#) into an array. This snippet works just for arguments without spaces:
arr=($#)
If I want to store the correct arguments into array I must use:
arr=("$#")
Why should I enclose $# in quotes?
I think this has something to do with parameter expansion and special parameters, but I don't think I got it well.
In the shell, whenever a variable (including special parameters like $#) in referenced without double-quotes, the value goes through word splitting and wildcard expansion after it's expanded. For example:
$ var="FOO * BAR"
$ printf "%s\n" "$var"
FOO * BAR
$ printf "%s\n" $var
FOO
Desktop
Documents
Downloads
Library
Movies
Music
Pictures
Public
BAR
In the second case, the variable value "FOO * BAR" got split into separate words ("FOO", "*", and "BAR"), and then the "*" was expanded into a list of matching files. This is why you almost always want to put variable references in double-quotes.
The same thing applies to $# -- if it's not in double-quotes, it's expanded into the list of parameters and then each one of them is subjected to that same word splitting and wildcard expansion that $var went through above. If it's in double-quotes, the parameter values are left unmolested.
BTW, there is another way to get the parameters: $*. This differs from $# in that it sticks all of the parameter values together with spaces between them (while $# maintains each parameter as a separate word). In double-quotes, "$*" gives a single word consisting of all parameters. Without double-quotes, $* sticks all the parameters together, then re-splits them (maybe at the same places, maybe not), and does wildcard expansion. Probably not what you wanted.
If you didn't surround it with quotes, "multiple words arg3" would be further expanded to multiple words arg3 - ie. the quotes preserve special characters after the variable has been expanded.
In other words, when you don't surround a variable expansion with quotes, what the variable expands to will further be expanded, which would in this case eliminate the double quotes around the third argument.
I want to write a wrapper bash script, and to pass all arguments to a called program. I was very sure, that this works correctly:
#!/bin/sh
someProgam $#
But when passing exotic arguments (empty, unescaped, in quotes, ...) this fails.
For example: without the wrapper script, someProgram "1 2" 3 results in the arguments
[1 2] and [3].
But called from the script, I get [1], [2], [3].
Braces are just for visualization.
NOTE: It's a Java program, which is called. But I think it doesn't matter.
#!/bin/sh
someProgram "$#"
See also the bash docs on special parameters.
BTW1, "$#" is not specific to bash. You can probably rely on "$#" in cross-platform sh scripts to be run just about anywhere.
BTW2, in case this happens to be the last line in that script, you can save your operating system a few bytes and an entry in the process table by changing the line to something like
exec someProgram "$#"
to augment ndim's answer: the behavior of "$#" is not specific to bash. it's prescribed by the Single Unix Specification:
2.2.3 Double-Quotes
Enclosing characters in double-quotes ( "" ) shall preserve the literal value of all characters within the double-quotes, with the exception of the characters dollar sign, backquote, and backslash, as follows:
The parameter '#' has special meaning inside double-quotes and is described in Special Parameters.
2.5.2 Special Parameters
Listed below are the special parameters and the values to which they shall expand. Only the values of the special parameters are listed; see Word Expansions for a detailed summary of all the stages involved in expanding words.
#
Expands to the positional parameters, starting from one. When the expansion occurs within double-quotes, and where field splitting (see Field Splitting) is performed, each positional parameter shall expand as a separate field, with the provision that the expansion of the first parameter shall still be joined with the beginning part of the original word (assuming that the expanded parameter was embedded within a word), and the expansion of the last parameter shall still be joined with the last part of the original word. If there are no positional parameters, the expansion of '#' shall generate zero fields, even when '#' is double-quoted.