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Bash Quick Start Guide

You're reading from   Bash Quick Start Guide Get up and running with shell scripting with Bash

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Product type Paperback
Published in Sep 2018
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781789538830
Length 186 pages
Edition 1st Edition
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Author (1):
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Tom Ryder Tom Ryder
Author Profile Icon Tom Ryder
Tom Ryder
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Table of Contents (10) Chapters Close

Preface 1. What is Bash? FREE CHAPTER 2. Bash Command Structure 3. Essential Commands 4. Input, Output, and Redirection 5. Variables and Patterns 6. Loops and Conditionals 7. Scripts, Functions, and Aliases 8. Best Practices 9. Other Books You May Enjoy

Using variables

The basic form of a variable assignment in shell script looks like this:

myshell='GNU Bourne-Again shell'

This declares a variable named myshell, and gives it the string contents GNU Bourne-Again shell.

Note that there is no space either before or after the equals sign, as there might be in a C-like language. Note also that the value in this example assignment is surrounded by single quotes, so the contents are interpreted literally, without expanding any special characters, in this case spaces. As with other single-quoted strings in shell script, the quotes themselves do not become part of the value.

You will need to quote any value that contains special characters in variable assignments. For new shell programmers, it is safest to quote all the values in their assignments; it might be unnecessary in some cases, but it doesn't do any harm, and...

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