Ever wondered why programming in Bash is so difficult? Bash employs the same constructs as traditional programming languages; however, under the hood, the logic is rather different.
The Bourne-Again SHell (Bash) was developed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) under the GNU Project, which gives it a somewhat special reputation within the Open Source community. Today, Bash is the default user shell on most Linux installations. Although Bash is just one of several well known UNIX shells, its wide distribution with Linux makes it an important tool to know.
The main purpose of a UNIX shell is to allow users to interact effectively with the system through the command line. A common shell action is to invoke an executable, which in turn causes the kernel to create a new running process. Shells have mechanisms to send the output of one program as input into another and facilities to interact with the filesystem. For example, a user can traverse the filesystem or direct the output of a program to a file.
Although Bash is primarily a command interpreter, it's also a programming language. Bash supports variables, functions and has control flow constructs, such as conditional statements and loops. However, all of this comes with some unusual quirks. This is because Bash attempts to fulfill two roles at the same time: to be a command interpreter and a programming language—and there is tension between the two.
All UNIX shells, including Bash, are primarily command interpreters. This trait has a deep history, stretching all the way to the very first shell and the first UNIX system. Over time, UNIX shells acquired the programming capabilities by evolution, and this has led to some unusual solutions for the programming environment. As many people come to Bash already having some background in traditional programming languages, the unusual perspective that Bash takes with programming constructs is a source of much confusion, as evidenced by many questions posted on Bash forums.
In this article, I discuss how programming constructs in Bash differ from traditional programming languages. For a true understanding of Bash, it's useful to understand how UNIX shells evolved, so I first review the relevant history, and then introduce several Bash features. The majority of this article shows how the unusual aspects of Bash programming originate from the need to blend the command interpreter function seamlessly with the capabilities of a programming language.
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