Setting a default value if a bash variable is undefined

Say you want to take an optional command line argument to your script. That means that maybe $1 is set to a value, or maybe it’s not. You can read out the value and assign a default in the case that $1 is not set using the syntax:

  variable=${1:-default-value}

Which will set $variable to “default-value” if $1 is not set.

Replacing new lines with nulls in bash

If you have a list of file names separated by new lines, and you want to turn it into a list of file names separated by null characters, for instance for use as input to xargs, then you can use the tr command, like this:

  $ cat /path/to/new-lines | tr '\n' '\0' > /path/to/null-separated

I found a whole article on various ways to replace text on *nix: rmnl — remove new line characters with tr, awk, perl, sed or c/c++.

Extracting a single file from a tar archive

You can use a parameter to the -x command line switch to tell the tar command that you just want to extract one particular file from the archive. For example:

  $ tar -x filename/to/extract -f tarfile.tar

You can use the -O command line switch in conjunction with the above to have the file’s contents printed on stdout rather than created in the file system.

Changing parent’s directory from a subshell

I was trying to figure out how to have a child process change the current directory of a parent process. Turns out you can’t quite do that. One thing I guess you could do is export a global variable and then have the parent check that when the child returns, but I decided on another approach. What I do is write a file to ~/bin/errdir that contains a single line in the format:

  pushd "/path/to/directory"

I can then source this as a command file after my script has run to change directory into the directory where the last erroneous file was encountered with the command:

  $ . errdir

When I’m finished I can just type ‘popd’ to return myself to wherever I was before I changed into the error directory.

Error handling in bash

I’ve been learning about approaches to error handling in bash. I found Error handling in BASH, Exit Shell Script Based on Process Exit Code, Writing Robust Bash Shell Scripts and Bash: Error handling all of which contained a nugget of useful information.

Particularly I learned about $LINENO, set -e (equiv: set -o errexit), set -o pipefail, set -E, set -u (equiv: set -o nounset), set -C (equiv: set -o noclobber), #!/bin/bash -eEu, trap, shopt -s expand_aliases, alias, $PIPESTATUS, subshells, unset, and more.

If you call exit without specifying a return code then $? is used, I didn’t know that.

I found this code snippet that demos a relatively race-condition free method of acquiring a lock file:

if ( set -o noclobber; echo "$$" > "$lockfile") 2> /dev/null; 
then
   trap 'rm -f "$lockfile"; exit $?' INT TERM EXIT

   critical-section
   
   rm -f "$lockfile"
   trap - INT TERM EXIT
else
   echo "Failed to acquire lockfile: $lockfile." 
   echo "Held by $(cat $lockfile)"
fi