this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2025
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Like programming in bash (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[โ€“] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

So true. Every time I have to look up how to write a bash for loop. Where does the semicolon go? Where is the newline? Is it terminated with done? Or with end? The worst part with bash is that when you do it wrong, most of the time there is no error but something completely wrong happens.

[โ€“] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

It all makes sense when you think about the way it will be parsed. I prefer to use newlines instead of semicolons to show the blocks more clearly.

for file in *.txt
do
    cat "$file"
done

The do and done serve as the loop block delimiters. Such as { and } in many other languages. The shell parser couldn't know where stuff starts/ends.

Edit: I agree that the then/fi, do/done case/esac are very inconsistent.

Also to fail early and raise errors on uninitialized variables, I recommend to add this to the beginning of your bash scripts:

set -euo pipefail

Or only this for regular sh scripts:

set -eu

-e: Exit on error

-u: Error on access to undefined variable

-o pipefail: Abort pipeline early if any part of it fails.

There is also -x that can be very useful for debugging as it shows a trace of every command and result as it is executed.