bash Cookbook

Command-Line Processing Steps

We’ve touched upon command-line processing throughout this book; we’ve mentioned how bash deals with single quotes (''), double quotes (“;”), and backslashes (\); how it separates characters on a line into words, even allowing you to specify the delimiter it uses via the environment variable $IFS; how it assigns the words to shell variables (e.g., $1, $2, etc); and how it can redirect input and output to/from files or to other processes (pipeline). In order to be a real expert at shell scripting (or to debug some gnarly problems), you might need to understand the various steps involved in command-line processing—especially the order in which they occur.

Each line that the shell reads from STDIN or from a script is called a pipeline because it contains one or more commands separated by zero or more pipe characters (|). Figure C-1 shows the steps in command-line processing. For each pipeline it reads, the shell breaks it up into commands, sets up the I/O for the pipeline, then does the following for each command.

1. Splits the command into tokens that are separated by the fixed set of metacharacters: space, tab, newline, ;, (, ), <, >, |, and &. Types of tokens include words, keywords, I/O redirectors, and semicolons.

2. Checks the first token of each command to see if it is a keyword with no quotes or backslashes. If it’s an opening keyword such as if and other control-structure openers, function , {,or (, then the command is actually a compound command. The ...