Introduction to Bash functions

Bash functions are an essential tool for anyone who works with the Bash shell on Linux systems. They allow you to encapsulate reusable pieces of code into named, parameterized units that can be called from anywhere in your Bash scripts or interactive shell sessions.

Let’s explore some of the key reasons why Bash functions are so important and useful.

Code reuse

One of the biggest benefits of Bash functions is that they promote code reuse. If you find yourself writing the same or very similar code over and over in your Bash scripts, that’s a good sign that you should extract that code into a reusable function!

For example, let’s say many of your scripts need to parse command-line arguments in a consistent way. Rather than copying and pasting the argument parsing logic into each script, you could define a parse_args function (the code can be found in this chapter’s folder in the book’s GitHub repository as...