CSC231 Bash Tutorial 8

--D. Thiebaut (talk) 13:13, 1 November 2017 (EDT)

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Bash Functions

There are two ways of declaring functions in bash, illustrated in the code below:

#! /bin/bash
# func1.sh
# D. Thiebaut
# prints some messages

printSomething() {
    echo "Hello there!"
}

function printSomethingElse {
    echo "Hello again!"
}

printSomething
printSomething
printSomethingElse

• Create the script above, make it executable, and run it, to see how it works.
• Add a call to printSomething inside the printSomethingElse function, just to see if functions can actually call functions... Does bash accept nested calls?

Passing Arguments

• Inside a function, $1 will refer to the first parameter passed to the function, $2 will refer to the second argument, etc.
• Here is an example, with both style functions:

#! /bin/bash
# func1.sh
# D. Thiebaut

printBar() {
    echo "------------------------"
}

function printName {
    echo "Hello $1"
}

printAge() {
    echo "Your age: $1"
}


printBar
printName "Kathleen McCartney"
printAge  61
printBar

Challenge 1

• Add a new function to func2.sh called printInfo(). The new function takes 2 parameters and calls printName and printAge to print both. Here is an example of how to call it (that will be the only function call in the main part of the script):

     printInfo  "Kathleen McCartney" 61

and the output will be the same as the previous version of func2.sh:

------------------------
Hello Kathleen McCartney
Your age: 61
------------------------

Solutions

Challenge 1

#! /bin/bash
# funcChallenge1.sh
# D. Thiebaut

printBar() {
    echo "------------------------"
}

function printName {
    echo "Hello $1"
}

function printAge {
    echo "Your age: $1"
}

function printInfo {
    printBar
    printName $1
    printAge $2
    printBar
}

printInfo "Kathleen McCartney" 61