45.12 Parameter Substitution

The Bourne shell has a handy set of operators for testing and setting shell variables. They're listed in

If you omit the colon (:) from the expressions in Table 45-2, the shell doesn't check for an empty parameter. In other words, the substitution will happen whenever the parameter is set. (That's how some early Bourne shells work: they don't understand a colon in parameter substitution.)

To see how parameter substitution works, here's another version of the bkedit script (44.8, 44.11):

#!/bin/sh
if cp "$1" "$1.bak"
then
    ${VISUAL:-/usr/ucb/vi} "$1"
    exit   # USE STATUS FROM EDITOR
else
    echo "`basename $0` quitting: can't make backup?" 1>&2
    exit 1
fi

If the VISUAL (6.3) environment variable is set and is not empty, its value (like /usr/local/bin/emacs) is used and the command line becomes /usr/local/bin/emacs "$1". If VISUAL isn't set, the command line will default to /usr/ucb/vi "$1".

You can use parameter substitution operators in any command line. You'll see them used with the colon (:) operator (45.9), checking or setting default values. There's an example below. The first substitution (${nothing=default}) will leave $nothing empty because the variable has been set. The second substitution will set $nothing to default because the variable has been set but is empty. The third substitution will leave $something set to stuff:

nothing=
something=stuff
: ${nothing=default}
: ${nothing:=default}
: ${something:=default}

The Korn shell and bash have similar string editing operators (9.7) like ${var##pattern}. They're useful in shell programs, as well as on the command line and in shell setup files.