I am confused by the usage of brackets, parentheses, curly braces in Bash, as well as the difference between their double or single forms. Is there a clear explanation?
In Bash, test
and [
are shell builtins.
The double bracket [[
, which is a shell keyword, enables additional functionality. For example, you can use &&
and ||
instead of -a
and -o
and there's a regular expression matching operator =~
.
Also, in a simple test, double square brackets seem to evaluate quite a lot quicker than single ones.
$ time for ((i=0; i<10000000; i++)); do [[ "$i" = 1000 ]]; done
real 0m24.548s
user 0m24.337s
sys 0m0.036s
$ time for ((i=0; i<10000000; i++)); do [ "$i" = 1000 ]; done
real 0m33.478s
user 0m33.478s
sys 0m0.000s
The braces, in addition to delimiting a variable name are used for parameter expansion so you can do things like:
Truncate the contents of a variable
$ var="abcde"; echo ${var%d*}
abc
Make substitutions similar to sed
$ var="abcde"; echo ${var/de/12}
abc12
Use a default value
$ default="hello"; unset var; echo ${var:-$default}
hello
and several more
Also, brace expansions create lists of strings which are typically iterated over in loops:
$ echo f{oo,ee,a}d
food feed fad
$ mv error.log{,.OLD}
(error.log is renamed to error.log.OLD because the brace expression
expands to "mv error.log error.log.OLD")
$ for num in {000..2}; do echo "$num"; done
000
001
002
$ echo {00..8..2}
00 02 04 06 08
$ echo {D..T..4}
D H L P T
Note that the leading zero and increment features weren't available before Bash 4.
Thanks to gboffi for reminding me about brace expansions.
Double parentheses are used for arithmetic operations:
((a++))
((meaning = 42))
for ((i=0; i<10; i++))
echo $((a + b + (14 * c)))
and they enable you to omit the dollar signs on integer and array variables and include spaces around operators for readability.
Bare double parentheses ((
...))
return 0 (true) if the value of the enclosed expression is non-zero, 1 (false) otherwise, so:
$ ((2 + 3 - 5)) || echo "last command returned 1"
last command returned 1
$ ((2 + 3 - 7)) && echo "last command returned 0"
last command returned 0
Single brackets are also used for array indices:
array[4]="hello"
element=${array[index]}
Curly brace are required for (most/all?) array references on the right hand side.
ephemient's comment reminded me that parentheses are also used for subshells. And that they are used to create arrays.
array=(1 2 3)
echo ${array[1]}
2