[FIXED] When do we need curly braces around shell variables?

Issue

In shell scripts, when do we use {} when expanding variables?

For example, I have seen the following:

var=10        # Declare variable

echo "${var}" # One use of the variable
echo "$var"   # Another use of the variable

Is there a significant difference, or is it just style? Is one preferred over the other?

Solution

In this particular example, it makes no difference. However, the {} in ${} are useful if you want to expand the variable foo in the string

"${foo}bar"

since "$foobar" would instead expand the variable identified by foobar.

Curly braces are also unconditionally required when:

• expanding array elements, as in ${array[42]}
• using parameter expansion operations, as in ${filename%.*} (remove extension)
• expanding positional parameters beyond 9: "$8 $9 ${10} ${11}"

Doing this everywhere, instead of just in potentially ambiguous cases, can be considered good programming practice. This is both for consistency and to avoid surprises like $foo_$bar.jpg, where it's not visually obvious that the underscore becomes part of the variable name.

Answered By - Fred Foo

Answer Checked By - Cary Denson (PHPFixing Admin)

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[FIXED] What is the meaning of the ${0##...} syntax with variable, braces and hash character in bash?

Issue

I just saw some code in bash that I didn't quite understand. Being the newbie bash scripter, I'm not sure what's going on.

echo ${0##/*}
echo ${0}

I don't really see a difference in output in these two commands (prints the script name). Is that # just a comment? And what's with the /*. If it is a comment, how come it doesn't interfere with the closing } brace?

Can anyone give me some insight into this syntax?

Solution

See the section on Substring removal on the parameter expansion page of the bash-hackers' wiki:

${PARAMETER#PATTERN} and ${PARAMETER##PATTERN}

This form is to remove the described pattern trying to match it from the beginning of the string. The operator # will try to remove the shortest text matching the pattern, while ## tries to do it with the longest text matching.

Example string (just a quote from a big man):

MYSTRING="Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send"

Syntax	Result
${MYSTRING#*in}	Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.
${MYSTRING##*in}	Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.

Answered By - Mark Byers

Answer Checked By - Cary Denson (PHPFixing Admin)

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