CHAPTER 9Reserved Words and Builtin Commands

There are almost 60 builtin commands and more than 20 reserved words in bash. Some of them are indispensable, and some are rarely used in scripts. Some are used primarily at the command line, and some are seldom seen anywhere. Some have been discussed already, and others will be used extensively in future chapters.

The reserved words (also called keywords) are !, case, coproc, do, done, elif, else, esac, fi, for, function, if, in, select, then, until, while, {, }, time, [[, and ]]. All except coproc, select, and time have been covered earlier in the book.

In addition to the standard commands, new builtin commands can be dynamically loaded into the shell at runtime. The bash source code package has ...

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