Bash Concepts

Internal

• bash

Metacharacters

Metacharacters are characters that have a special meaning to bash and are interpreted and possibly modified before the modified strings are sent to the command as arguments. Also see regular expressions metacharacters.

Space

For bash, a space is a metacharacter that separates a command from its arguments, and arguments from each other.

Single Quotes

Enclosing a string in single quotes tells the shell NOT to interpret other shell metacharacters in the text between quotes.

Globbing

Bash cannot recognize regular expressions but it can do filename expansion. The process is also known as globbing. The process recognizes and expands wild cards. Globbing interprets the following characters (for more details on metacharacters, see Regular Expressions Concepts - Metacharacters:

The Wild Card (*)

The wild card (*) matches every name in a given directory. Strings containing * will not match filenames that start with a dot.

The Question Mark (?)

The question mark (?) serves as a single-character "wild card" for filename expansion.

The Character Class [...]

The character class matches just one of the characters listed among square brackets. One of those characters must exist in the file name, on the specified position, for the name to match.

Negation (^)

^ negates the sense of match for the above.

Login Shell

A login shell is a shell whose first character of its argument zero is a -, or it was started with the --login option.

Interactive Shell

An interactive shell is a shell started:

• without the -c option
• without non-option arguments
• with the -i option

The interactive shell's standard input and error are both connected to terminals.

$- includes i if the shell is interactive, allowing a script or a startup file to test this state.

Non-interactive Shell

A shell started with -c option.

bash Startup Files

When bash is invoked as an interactive login shell, or as a non-interactive shell with the --login option, it first executes commands from /etc/profile, if exists.

Them it looks for ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login and ~/.profile in that order. It executes commands from the first one that exists and is readable. The --noprofile option may be used when the shell is started to inhibit this behavior.

When a login shell exits, bash executes commands from ~/.bash_logout, if it exists.

When an interactive shell that is not a login shell is started, bash executes commands from ~/.bashrc, if it exists. This may be inhibited by using the --norc option. The --rcfile file option will force bash to execute commands from the specified file instead of ~/.bashrc.

When bash is started in non-interactive mode, to run a shell script, for example, it looks for the variable BASH_ENV in the environment, expands its value if it appears there, and uses the expanded value as the name of a file execute. Bash behaves as if the following command were executed:

if [ -n "$BASH_ENV" ]; then . "$BASH_ENV"; fi

but the value of the PATH variable is not used to search for the file name.

If any of the files exist but cannot be read, bash reports an error.

Variables

bash Variables

bash Environment Variables

bash Environment Variables

Command Substitution

Command Substitution

Process

Foreground Process

Unless otherwise specified, a process launched by the shell will run in foreground, blocking use of the shell for the duration of the process, because the shells stdin, stdout and stderr are redirected to the process. A foreground process can be typically stopped by sending [[Linux_Signals#SIGINT_.282.29|SIGINT] signal into it, and the shell sends SIGINT when Ctrl-C is pressed. The foreground process can be typically suspended by sending SIGTSTP signal into it. The shell sends SIGTSTP when Ctrl-Z is pressed.