The following bash command substitution does not work as I thought.
echo $TMUX_$(echo 1)
only prints 1 and I am expecting the value of the variable $TMUX_1.I also tried:
echo ${TMUX_$(echo 1)}
-bash: ${TMUXPWD_$(echo 1)}: bad substitution
Any suggestions ?
If I understand correctly what you're looking for, you're trying to programatically construct a variable name and then access the value of that variable. Doing this sort of thing normally requires an eval statement:
eval "echo \$TMUX_$(echo 1)"
Important features of this statement include the use of double-quotes, so that the $( ) gets properly interpreted as a command substitution, and the escaping of the first $ so that it doesn't get evaluated the first time through. Another way to achieve the same thing is
eval 'echo $TMUX_'"$(echo 1)"
where in this case I used two strings which automatically get concatenated. The first is single-quoted so that it's not evaluated at first.
There is one exception to the eval requirement: Bash has a method of indirect referencing, ${!name}, for when you want to use the contents of a variable as a variable name. You could use this as follows:
tmux_var = "TMUX_$(echo 1)"
echo ${!tmux_var}
I'm not sure if there's a way to do it in one statement, though, since you have to have a named variable for this to work.
P.S. I'm assuming that echo 1 is just a stand-in for some more complicated command ;-)
Are you looking for arrays? Bash has them. There are a number of ways to create and use arrays in bash, the section of the bash manpage on arrays is highly recommended. Here is a sample of code:
TMUX=( "zero", "one", "two" )
echo ${TMUX[2]}
The result in this case is, of course, two.
Here are a few short lines from the bash manpage:
Bash provides one-dimensional indexed and associative array variables. Any variable may be
used as an indexed array; the declare builtin will explicitly declare an array. There is
no maximum limit on the size of an array, nor any requirement that members be indexed or
assigned contiguously. Indexed arrays are referenced using integers (including arithmetic
expressions) and are zero-based; associative arrays are referenced using arbitrary
strings.
An indexed array is created automatically if any variable is assigned to using the syntax
name[subscript]=value. The subscript is treated as an arithmetic expression that must
evaluate to a number greater than or equal to zero. To explicitly declare an indexed
array, use declare -a name (see SHELL BUILTIN COMMANDS below). declare -a name[subscript]
is also accepted; the subscript is ignored.
This works (tested):
eval echo \$TMUX_`echo 1`
Probably not very clear though. Pretty sure any solutions will require backticks around the echo to get that to work.
Related
This question already has answers here:
Backticks vs braces in Bash
(3 answers)
Brackets ${}, $(), $[] difference and usage in bash
(1 answer)
Closed 4 years ago.
I have two questions and could use some help understanding them.
What is the difference between ${} and $()? I understand that ()
means running command in separate shell and placing $ means passing
the value to variable. Can someone help me in understanding
this? Please correct me if I am wrong.
If we can use for ((i=0;i<10;i++)); do echo $i; done and it works fine then why can't I use it as while ((i=0;i<10;i++)); do echo $i; done? What is the difference in execution cycle for both?
The syntax is token-level, so the meaning of the dollar sign depends on the token it's in. The expression $(command) is a modern synonym for `command` which stands for command substitution; it means run command and put its output here. So
echo "Today is $(date). A fine day."
will run the date command and include its output in the argument to echo. The parentheses are unrelated to the syntax for running a command in a subshell, although they have something in common (the command substitution also runs in a separate subshell).
By contrast, ${variable} is just a disambiguation mechanism, so you can say ${var}text when you mean the contents of the variable var, followed by text (as opposed to $vartext which means the contents of the variable vartext).
The while loop expects a single argument which should evaluate to true or false (or actually multiple, where the last one's truth value is examined -- thanks Jonathan Leffler for pointing this out); when it's false, the loop is no longer executed. The for loop iterates over a list of items and binds each to a loop variable in turn; the syntax you refer to is one (rather generalized) way to express a loop over a range of arithmetic values.
A for loop like that can be rephrased as a while loop. The expression
for ((init; check; step)); do
body
done
is equivalent to
init
while check; do
body
step
done
It makes sense to keep all the loop control in one place for legibility; but as you can see when it's expressed like this, the for loop does quite a bit more than the while loop.
Of course, this syntax is Bash-specific; classic Bourne shell only has
for variable in token1 token2 ...; do
(Somewhat more elegantly, you could avoid the echo in the first example as long as you are sure that your argument string doesn't contain any % format codes:
date +'Today is %c. A fine day.'
Avoiding a process where you can is an important consideration, even though it doesn't make a lot of difference in this isolated example.)
$() means: "first evaluate this, and then evaluate the rest of the line".
Ex :
echo $(pwd)/myFile.txt
will be interpreted as
echo /my/path/myFile.txt
On the other hand ${} expands a variable.
Ex:
MY_VAR=toto
echo ${MY_VAR}/myFile.txt
will be interpreted as
echo toto/myFile.txt
Why can't I use it as bash$ while ((i=0;i<10;i++)); do echo $i; done
I'm afraid the answer is just that the bash syntax for while just isn't the same as the syntax for for.
your understanding is right. For detailed info on {} see bash ref - parameter expansion
'for' and 'while' have different syntax and offer different styles of programmer control for an iteration. Most non-asm languages offer a similar syntax.
With while, you would probably write i=0; while [ $i -lt 10 ]; do echo $i; i=$(( i + 1 )); done in essence manage everything about the iteration yourself
I'm working on getting accustomed to shell scripting and ran across a behavior I found interesting and unexplained. In the following code the first for loop will execute correctly but the second will not.
declare letters=(a b c d e f g)
for i in {0..7}; do
echo ${letters[i]}
done
for i in {0..${#letters[*]}}; do
echo ${letters[i]}
done
The second for loop results in the following error:
syntax error: operand expected (error token is "{0..7}")
What confuses me is that ${#letters[*]} is clearly getting evaluated, correctly, to the number 7. But despite this the code fails even though we just saw that the same loop with {0..7} works perfectly fine.
What is the reason for this?
I am running OS X 10.12.2, GNU bash version 3.2.57.
The bracket expansion happens before parameter expansion (see EXPANSIONS in man bash), therefore it works for literals only. In other words, you can't use brace expansion with variables.
You can use a C-style loop:
for ((i=0; i<${#letters[#]}; i++)) ; do
echo ${letters[i]}
done
or an external command like seq:
for i in $(seq 1 ${#letters[#]}) ; do
echo ${letters[i-1]}
done
But you usually don't need the indices, instead one loops over the elements themselves, see #TomFenech's answer below. He also shows another way of getting the list of indices.
Note that it should be {0..6}, not 7.
Brace expansion occurs before parameter expansion, so you can't use a variable as part of a range.
Expand the array into a list of values:
for letter in "${letters[#]}"; do
echo "$letter"
done
Or, expand the indices of the array into a list:
for i in ${!letters[#]}; do
echo "${letters[i]}"
done
As mentioned in the comments (thanks), these two approaches also accommodate sparse arrays; you can't always assume that an array defines a value for every index between 0 and ${#letters[#]}.
I'm trying to create associative arrays based on variables. So below is a super simplified version of what I'm trying to do (the ls command is not really what I want, just used here for illustrative purposes)...
I have a statically defined array (text-a,text-b). I then want to iterate through that array, and create associative arrays with those names and _AA appended to them (so associative arrays called text-a_AA and text-b_AA).
I don't really need the _AA appended, but was thinking it might be
necessary to avoid duplicate names since $NAME is already being used
in the loop.
I will need those defined and will be referencing them in later parts of the script, and not just within the for loop seen below where I'm trying to define them... I want to later, for example, be able to reference text-a_AA[NUM] (again, using variables for the text-a_AA part). Clearly what I have below doesn't work... and from what I can tell, I need to be using namerefs? I've tried to get the syntax right, and just can't seem to figure it out... any help would be greatly appreciated!
#!/usr/bin/env bash
NAMES=('text-a' 'text-b')
for NAME in "${NAMES[#]}"
do
NAME_AA="${NAME}_AA"
$NAME_AA[NUM]=$(cat $NAME | wc -l)
done
for NAME in "${NAMES[#]}"
do
echo "max: ${$NAME_AA[NUM]}"
done
You may want to use "NUM" as the name of the associative array and file name as the key. Then you can rewrite your code as:
NUM[${NAME}_AA]=$(wc -l < "$NAME")
Then rephrase your loop as:
for NAME in "${NAMES[#]}"
do
echo "max: ${NUM[${NAME}_AA]}"
done
Check your script at shellcheck.net
As an aside: all uppercase is not a good practice for naming normal shell variables. You may want to take a look at:
Correct Bash and shell script variable capitalization
I would like to achieve this in Bash: echo $(a=1)and print the value of variable a
I test eval, $$a,{}, $() but none of them work as most of the times either I got literally a=1 or in one case (I don't remember which) it tried to execute the value.
I known that I can do: a=1;echo $a but because I'm little fun one command per line (even if sometimes is getting little complicated) I was wondering if is possible to do this either with echo or with printf
If you know that $a is previously unset, you can do this using the following syntax:
echo ${a:=1}
This, and other types of parameter expansion, are defined in the POSIX shell command language specification.
If you want to assign a numeric value, another option, which doesn't depend on the value previously being unset, would be to use an arithmetic expansion:
echo $(( a = 1 ))
This assigns the value and echoes the number that has been assigned.
It's worth mentioning that what you're trying to do cannot be done in a subshell by design because a child process cannot modify the environment of its parent.
I want to pass a variable number of 'tuples' as arguments into a bash script and go through them in a loop using pattern matching, something like this:
for *,* in "$#"; do
#do something with first part of tuple
#do something with second part of tuple
done
is this possible? If so, how do I access each part of the tuple?
For example I would like to call my script like:
bash bashscript.sh first_file.xls,1 second_file,2 third_file,2 ... nth_file,1
Since bash doesn't have a tuple datatype (it just has strings), you need would need to encode and decode them yourself. For example:
$ bash bashscript.sh first_file.xls,1 second_file,2 third_file,2 ... nth_file,1
In bashscript.sh:
for tuple in "$#"; do
IFS=, read first second <<< "$tuple"
...
done
Yes, it's possible, and there is more than one way to do it. You can use the prefix/suffix expansion syntax on variables (e.g. ${var#prefix}, ${var##prefix}, ${var%suffix}, ${var%%suffix} - these remove either the shortest or longest prefix/suffix matching the specified pattern). Or you can replace the positional parameters with e.g. IFS=, set -- ${var} (although you'd have to make sure to save the rest of the original parameters in some way first so you can continue your loop). You can use arrays, if your version of bash is new enough (and if it isn't it's pretty old...). Those are probably three of the better methods, but there are others...
Edit: some examples using the suffix/prefix expansions:
for tuple in first_file.xls,1
do
echo ${tuple%,*} # "first_file.xls"
echo ${tuple#*,} # "1"
done
If your tuples are more than 2-ary, that method's a little more complex; for example:
for tuple in x,y,z
do
first=${tuple%%,*}
rest=${tuple#${first}}
second=${rest%%,*}
last=${rest#*,}
done
In that case you might prefer #chepner's answer of IFS=, read first second third <<< "${tuple}"... Otherwise, the bookkeeping can get hairy for large tuples. Setting an array from the tuple would be an acceptable alternative as well.
For simple pairs, though, I tend to prefer just stripping off a prefix/suffix as appropriate...