Suppose you are working on a complex bash script to automate a series of tasks on your Linux system. You will notice that as it grows, there are certain parts of the script where the same block of code is repeated multiple times. For this, you can wrap the repeating bit in a block called "function" and reuse it, making the overall code more streamlined and organized. In this article, we will discuss what is a function in bash and how to use it to automate Linux tasks.
Bash in 100 seconds
Bash functions are reusable blocks of code in a bash script that can be grouped together and named to avoid writing the same code repeatedly. Much like other programming languages, you get the ability to use functions in your bash scripts. Functions help you organize your entire script into smaller modules, making your code more readable, debuggable, and reusable. In other words, functions are like a script within a script.
Now that you have a basic understanding of what bash functions are, let's see how to define them to make our Linux workflow much easier. The basic syntax for defining bash functions is:
You can even use the one-line version of the above syntax:
