Writing Functions in Shell Script

Have you ever written a huge Unix script and thought you would have divided this script into pieces of reusable code? Well don’t worry. You can create functions in unix shell script and make reusable code and call the function from your unix code.

Hello World Function in Unix shell script

First let us see a simple code snippet for creating hello world function in Unix. Create a shell script file helloworld.sh and paste following code in it and execute it.

#function hello world defined
fnHelloWorld()
{
        #print hello world
        echo "Hello World";
}

#calling hello world function
fnHelloWorld
Code language: Bash (bash)

Output

$./helloworld.sh
Hello World
Code language: Bash (bash)

The above shell script will print Hello World on command prompt. All we have done is we have defined a function in shell script by fnHelloWorld() {} and called this by just fnHelloWorld.

Passing argument to function in shell scripts

Passing argument to the functions in shell script is very easy. Just use $1, $2, .. $n variables that represent arguments in the function. Following is the example of function that takes two argument and prints them. Note that we have called the function fnArgumentFunction and passed two arguments “Hello” and “World” by fnArgumentFunction “Hello” “World”.

fnArgumentFunction()
{
        echo "Argument 1:" . $1
        echo "Argument 2:" . $2
}

fnArgumentFunction "Hello" "World"
Code language: Bash (bash)

Thus if your function will use three arguments you can just use $1, $2 and $3 in your code. You may want to use $# which gives you number of arguments passed to the function if you want to implement a function with variable arguments.

Returning values from Function in Shell Script

Like passing arguments in function in shell script, returning values are also easy. Following is the example of a function that take two input string and returns the concatenated values. We store the return parameter in a variable and print the variable on screen.

fnReturnFunction()
{
        echo $1$2
}
value=$(fnReturnFunction "holly" "wood")
Code language: Bash (bash)

Note that in above example we have called the function by $(fnReturnFunction “holly” “wood”).