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Command Substitution in a Bash Shell Script

Written By
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Web Webster
Web Webster
Feb 8, 2011

[ Thanks to Andrew
Weber
for this link. ]

“Command substitution is when you take the output of
one command and use it as the argument for another command. If you
simply invoke the date utility, you’ll get the following output.

date
Fri Jan 19 17:13:29 EST 2007

“That works here, but it might not work well in other cases,
like when you’re writing a bash script. You would then need to
consider using command substitution. There are two ways to do
this.

“The first way is the more modern way, and is really the only
way that you want to use. You surround the command that you want to
substitute with parentheses, and then precede it with a
dollar-sign. Here, we’re using echo to show the output of
date.”


Complete Story

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Web Webster

Web Webster

Web Webster has more than 20 years of writing and editorial experience in the tech sector. He’s written and edited news, demand generation, user-focused, and thought leadership content for business software solutions, consumer tech, and Linux Today, he edits and writes for a portfolio of tech industry news and analysis websites including webopedia.com, and DatabaseJournal.com.

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