What's New in Bash Parameter Expansion



The sub-section of interest today is Parameter Expansion—that is, $var in its many forms. Don't be confused by the name though, it's really about parameter and variable expansion.

I'm not going to cover all the different forms of parameter expansion here, just some that I think may not be as widely known as others. If you're completely new to parameter expansion, check out my ancient post or one of the many articles elsewhere on the internet.

Case Conversion

Gone are the days of using tr '[[:lower:]]' '[[:upper:]]' to convert strings to uppercase:

$ a=hello
$ echo ${a^}       # First character only
$ echo ${a^^}      # All characters

And for going to lowercase:

$ echo ${a,}       # First character only
$ echo ${a,,}      # All characters

You also can specify a character after the operator and change the case only of characters that match:

$ a=hello
$ echo ${a^l}      # First character if it is an 'l'
$ echo ${a^^ll}    # All characters that are 'l's

Names Starting with Some Prefix

Need a list of all the variables whose names match a certain prefix? Do this:

$ mya=1
$ myb=2
$ yourc=3
$ echo ${!my*}
mya myb


Bash even can give you a taste of the good-old days of programming C and Assembler and using indirect addressing—well sort of:

$ var=somevalue
$ var_name=var
$ echo ${!var_name}

What's happening here is that the value of var_name gives you the name of the actual variable to be expanded. That variable then is expanded and becomes the result of the expansion. In this case, "var_name" has the value "var", so the variable "var" is expanded to yield the ultimate value of "somevalue".

Short Detour into Namerefs

As a bit of an aside, because it's not really about "parameter expansion", let's take a quick look at namerefs in bash. A nameref variable is a variable that references another variable:

$ var=no
$ declare -n ref=var   # -n == nameref
$ ref=yes
$ echo $ref

The variable "ref" is a reference to the variable "var". When you assign to "ref", you actually change the value of "var". This can be particularly handy in getting values out of a function by passing the name of a variable to the function:

$ cat nref.sh
function func()
    local -n up_value=$1  # -n == nameref
    echo "Changing '${!up_value}' in ${FUNCNAME[0]}"

echo "Before function call, aval is $aval"
func aval  # pass var *name* to func
echo "After function call, aval is $aval"

Running that, you get:

$ bash nref.sh
Before function call, aval is old_value
Changing 'aval' in func
After function call, aval is new_value

Since indirection is automatic with nameref variables, you don't use the exclamation point expansion to get the value of the referenced variable; normal $var expansion works. In the case of namerefs, the exclamation point expansion yields a different result: the name of the referenced variable. So, this slight detour dealt with parameter expansion after all.


There are also a number of expansions of the form ${var@?}, where the "?" is one of the letters "Q", "E", "P", "A" or "a" that can transform the value or get you information about the variable itself. For example:

$ declare -a array=(1 2)
$ echo Attributes: ${array@a}
Attributes: a         # i.e. array was declared with -a

Check the man page for more information about these "@" expansions.

Unset or Null

And to wrap it up, one other subtle thing that can be easy to overlook when reading the parameter expansion section relates to the colon (:) in many of the expansions. For example, the :- form of expansion allows a default value to be specified if a variable is unset or null:

unset var
$ echo var: ${var:-default}
var: default

$ echo var: ${var:-default}
var: default

And now if you leave out the colon:

unset var
$ echo var: ${var-default}
var: default

$ echo var: ${var-default}

So leaving out the colon changes the test from "unset or null" to just a test for "unset". This applies to the :-, :=, :?, and :+ forms of parameter expansion as well.

Your Mileage May Vary

If something doesn't seem to work, check your bash version:



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