Passing arguments in Bash functions

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Passing arguments in Bash functions

Author：JIYIK Last Updated：2025/03/20 Views：

A shell function is a group of commands that work together to form a complete routine. Each function must have its own name. Shell functions have their own set of command line options. To retrieve the arguments supplied to a function, we can use shell variables $1, $2, … $n.

Using Function Printing in Bash`Hello World`

#!/bin/bash

hello_world () {
   echo "Hello World!"
}

hello_world

Output:

Hello World!

Here, the curly brace {denoted the start of the function body. The closing curly brace }defined hello_worldthe end of the function. Finally, we executed the function as many times as needed.

Passing strings as arguments to Bash functions

Bash makes it very easy to define functions that take arguments. In this example, we will create hello_worlda function and use shell variables to pass strings as arguments by position. That is $1, , $2and so on.

#!/bin/bash

hello_world () {
   echo "Hello $1"
}

hello_world "World Again!"

Here, "World Again!"it will be placed on $1.

Output:

Hello World Again!

Passing integers as arguments to Bash functions

In this example, we will create a addfunction, call it, and pass the integer as an argument. We will then pass 1and 2as arguments, placing them in $1and respectively $2.

#!/bin/bash
add() {
    result=$(($1 + $2))
    echo "Result is: $result"
}
    
add 1 2

Output:

Result is: 3

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