How to use variables in bash?

Bash defines 3 types of variables shell Arguments,local variables, and environment variables.

Local Variables

local variables are tied to a shell script or a terminal session, there are great for accessing data later, and for modular software, you can declare a variable by

#!/usr/bin/env bash
name="mehdi"

Notice the = has no spacing with variable name, this is important and shell will error out if you put spaces around =. To access the variable preside it with a $ , for example to print the value in a variable use the echo command.

$ echo $name

You can assign your variables a default value using brace expression.

FOO=${FOO:-'default'}

you can also delete variables with unset command.

$ unset name

Understand Bash Variable scope

every variable defined in a bash script is called a global variable. global in the context of the script and can be accessed from any where is the script, however you can define local variables in a functions using local var=value.

The variables are declared and populated with the function,when a function terminates these variables are flushed out from the process memory.

The example below showcase variable scopes,

#!/usr/bin/env bash

fruit="banana"

function hello(){
    local fruit="apple"
    echo $fruit
}

# calling hello function
hello

echo $fruit

in this script we are accessing the same variable $fruit in different scope in a function and global mode, in the function we defined a local variable with the same name and we echo it, after executing

# output
apple
banana

Another thing to watch out for is possessing values passed from users with potentially spaces, its recommend to always use "$variable" instead of $variable

filename="new doc.docx"
grep 'date' $filename

in this example the grep commend will try to search for date in two files new and doc.docx , because it tires white spaces as separate arguments, this is why it recommended to wrap variables in ""

filename="new doc.docx"
grep 'date' "$filename"

Now grep will search in the file new doc.docx, this problem is very common in bash scripting, and can cause you some time debugging your scripts, so watch out for it.

Local variables are essential in Bash programming, and great for storing values for later use, variables can be strings,numbers or arrays. accessing a non declared variable will gives an empty string. There is another type predefined variables Positional arguments.

Arguments

Arguments are special variables used to access input from uses, arguments can be passed to either a script or a function within a script.

$ ./myscript.sh arg1 arg2

In this example, we passed two arguments to the script, the $1=arg1, $2=arg2, and $0=./myscript.sh arguments can be passed to either scripts or functions, you find a table below of all possible arguments and theirs meanings.

Positional arguments are used to pass values to functions or scripts, but what if you want to pass values to another script from within a script, you can use environment variables.

Environment Variables

Special variable that change the behavior of underlying Operating system or its corresponding processes/programs, the management of there variable is outside programs, its the operating system job to manage the life cycle of these variables, running programs can access there variables.

You can declare a environment variable using export keyword, any process forked from the current shell session will inherit these variables and can access them.

$ export VAR="value"

Environment vars are tied to process, when process terminates, they are gone, to persist variables you can append the commend above in special files .bashrc or .bash_profile in your home directory.

You can also print all environment vars defined in your shell session with commands below.

$ env
or
$ printenv

To search for a variable you can use pipes and grep command

$ env | grep 'VAR'

Environment variables are great for configuring programs, passing values to processes and more, in the table below I have listed the most practical ones, in bash scripting.

Environment variables are great for accessing system information and they come handy in system programing and in system administration.

Conclusion

In this post, we discussed different variables in Bash, Local Variables,Positional Arguments, and Environment Variables, each one has its capabilities and use cases.