The Basics Of Bash: Writing Data

Mark Wilkinson hits us with some basic Bash output management:

If you have experience with PowerShell, some properties of Bash variables will feel familiar. In Bash, variables are denoted with a $ just like in PowerShell, but unlike PowerShell the $ is only needed when they are being referenced. When you are assigning a value to a variable, the $ is left off:

#!/bin/bash
set -e
set -u

my_var="World"

printf "Hello ${my_var}\n"

Above we assigned a value to my_var without using the $, but when we then referenced it in the printf statement, we had to use a $. We also enclosed the variable name in curly braces. This is not required in all cases, but it is a good idea to get in the habit of using them. In cases where you are using positional parameters above 9 (we’ll talk about this later) or you are using a variable in the middle of a string the braces are required, but there is no harm in adding them every time you use a variable in a string.

The basic syntax is pretty familiar to most programming languages, and there’s nothing scary about outputs, even when Mark starts getting into streams.