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What are the syntax rules for identifiers, especially function and variable names, in Bash?

I wrote a Bash script and tested it on various versions of Bash on Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat 5 and 6, and even an old Solaris 8 box. The script ran well, so it shipped.

Yet when a user tried it on SUSE machines, it gave a "not a valid identifier" error. Fortunately, my guess that there was an invalid character in the function name was right. The hyphens were messing it up.

The fact that a script that was at least somewhat tested would have completely different behaviour on another Bash or distro was disconcerting. How can I avoid this?

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  • 1
    What version of bash was on these machines? (Specifically the SUSE machine?) Commented Jan 23, 2015 at 17:05
  • Unfortunately, I don't have easy access to them now. They were 3.something. Commented Jan 26, 2015 at 15:25

6 Answers 6

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From the manual:

 Shell Function Definitions ... name () compound-command [redirection] function name [()] compound-command [redirection]

name is defined elsewhere:

 name A word consisting only of alphanumeric characters and under‐ scores, and beginning with an alphabetic character or an under‐ score. Also referred to as an identifier.

So hyphens are not valid. And yet, on my system, they do work...

$ bash --version GNU bash, version 4.2.25(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)
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2 Comments

In --posix mode hyphens are not permitted (see §6.11), so supporting hyphens is a Bash-ism. I'm not sure from the manual what other characters Bash implicitly supports, but I know that : and . can also be used in function names (though :, at least, breaks tab-completion).
Question mark is sometimes allowed if they are defined with keyword function. For example I have a function source? which check for existence before sourcing.
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The question was about "the rules", which has been answered two different ways, each correct in some sense, depending on what you want to call "the rules". Just to flesh out @rici's point that you can shove about any character in a function name, I wrote a small bash script to try to check every possible (0-255) character as a function name, as well as as the second character of a function name:

#!/bin/bash ASCII=( nul soh stx etx eot enq ack bel bs tab nl vt np cr so si dle \ dc1 dc2 dc3 dc4 nak syn etb can em sub esc fs gs rs us sp ) for((i=33; i < 127; ++i)); do printf -v Hex "%x" $i printf -v Chr "\x$Hex" ASCII[$i]="$Chr" done ASCII[127]=del for((i=128; i < 256; ++i)); do ASCII[$i]=$(printf "0X%x" $i) done # ASCII table is now defined function Test(){ Illegal="" for((i=1; i <= 255; ++i)); do Name="$(printf \\$(printf '%03o' $i))" eval "function $1$Name(){ return 0; }; $1$Name ;" 2>/dev/null if [[ $? -ne 0 ]]; then Illegal+=" ${ASCII[$i]}" # echo Illegal: "${ASCII[$i]}" fi done printf "Illegal: %s\n" "$Illegal" } echo "$BASH_VERSION" Test Test "x" # can we really do funky crap like this? function [}{(){ echo "Let me take you to, funkytown!" } [}{ # why yes, we can! # though editor auto-indent modes may punish us

I actually skip NUL (0x00), as that's the one character bash may object to finding in the input stream. The output from this script was:

4.4.0(1)-release Illegal: soh tab nl sp ! " # $ % & ' ( ) * 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 ; < > \ ` { | } ~ del Illegal: soh " $ & ' ( ) ; < > [ \ ` | del Let me take you to, funkytown!

Note that bash happily lets me name my function "[}{". Probably my code is not quite rigorous enough to provide the exact rules for legality-in-practice, but it should give a flavor of what manner of abuse is possible. I wish I could mark this answer "For mature audiences only."

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9 Comments

It would be helpful to include the Bash version you ran your script against.
You can't define a function with an all-number name, but you can start with a number. Also, some of the supposed illegalities here are because of bad quoting in the invocation of the function. For example, you can name a function *... but the way this test does it, it produces an error. So the actual list of characters you can't have in the first place of a function name is smaller than the list here... but the list of second-place characters is longer, because again, this script isn't invoking the function correctly.
You can use function * { echo hello; } (in Bash 4.4), but you probably need to escape it when calling it to avoid globbing. Same for ~ (tilde expansion), and ! (negates exit code). ? would be the same as *, if you have single-character filenames. You can also define a function %, but I can't find a way to call it, since just giving a word starting with % acts the same as running fg on it, even if escaped. And if you disable interactive_comments, you can use # as a function name only in an interactive shell (non-interactive shells always take # as a comment marker).
@muru - you need to have a space between the * and the () for it to work. No `\` needed.
Ew, gross. Incidentally, the fact that : is permitted forms the basis of the shortest forkbomb.
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Command identifiers and variable names have different syntaxes. A variable name is restricted to alphanumeric characters and underscore, not starting with a digit. A command name, on the other hand, can be just about anything which doesn't contain bash metacharacters (and even then, they can be quoted).

In bash, function names can be command names, as long as they would be parsed as a WORD without quotes. (Except that, for some reason, they cannot be integers.) However, that is a bash extension. If the target machine is using some other shell (such as dash), it might not work, since the Posix standard shell grammar only allows "NAME" in the function definition form (and also prohibits the use of reserved words).

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4 Comments

However, the SUSE machines were using Bash (according to echo $SHELL). I'm not sure why it was unhappy with the hyphens when the stock Bash other major distros didn't care.
@labyrinth: "echo $SHELL" does not tell you which shell is executing. It tells you what the current user's default shell is. So it's quite possible that the command was running in a different shell, for whatever reason (for example, it was in a script starting with a shebang line with #!/bin/sh). Another possibility, although it seems less likely, is that the script was running in a "posix" shell, either because the environment variable POSIXLY_CORRECT was set, or because set -p was executed, or -p was included in the command-line options for bash.
no, there is no shebang line in the script, so if it were not using the default login shell, it would have to be a different reason than that.
@labyrinth: If the script has no shebang line, then it is not well defined which shell will be invoked to execute it. It might be /bin/sh (which is the behaviour of the execlp library call), or it might be the current shell (bash and ksh handle missing shebang lines this way.) If the script was explicitly invoked with sh script, then of course it will be sh which executes it, regardless of shebang line or $SHELL setting.
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Note The biggest correction here is that newline is never allowed in a function name.

My answer:

  • Bash --posix: [a-zA-Z_][0-9a-zA-Z_]*
  • Bash 3.0-4.4: [^#%0-9\0\1\9\10 "$&'();<>\`|\x7f][^\0\1\9\10 "$&'();<>\`|\x7f]*
  • Bash 5.0: [^#%0-9\0\9\10 "$&'();<>\`|][^\0\9\10 "$&'();<>\`|]*
    • \1 and \x7f works now
  • Bash 5.1: [^#%\0\9\10 "$&'();<>\`|][^\0\9\10 "$&'();<>\`|]*
    • Numbers can come first?! Yep!
  • Any bash 3-5: [^#%0-9\0\1\9\10 "$&'();<>\`|\x7f][^\0\1\9\10 "$&'();<>\`|\x7f]*
    • Same as 3.0-4.4
  • My suggestion (opinion): [^#%0-9\0-\f "$&'();<>\`|\x7f-\xff][^\0-\f "$&'();<>\`|\x7f-\xff]
    • Positive version: [!*+,-./:=?@A-Z\[\]^_a-z{}~][#%0-9!*+,-./:=?@A-Z\[\]^_a-z{}~]*

My version of the test:

for ((x=1; x<256; x++)); do hex="$(printf "%02x" $x)" name="$(printf \\x${hex})" if [ "${x}" = "10" ]; then name=$'\n' fi if [ "$(echo -n "${name}" | xxd | awk '{print $2}')" != "${hex}" ]; then echo "$x failed first sanity check" fi ( eval "function ${name}(){ echo ${x};}" &>/dev/null if test "$("${name}" 2>/dev/null)" != "${x}"; then eval "function ok${name}doe(){ echo ${x};}" &>/dev/null if test "$(type -t okdoe 2>/dev/null)" = "function"; then echo "${x} failed second sanity test" fi if test "$("ok${name}doe" 2>/dev/null)" != "${x}"; then echo "${x}(${name}) never works" else echo "${x}(${name}) cannot be first" fi else # Just assume everything over 128 is hard, unless this says otherwise if test "${x}" -gt 127; then if declare -pF | grep -q "declare -f \x${hex}"; then echo "${x} works, but is actually not difficult" declare -pF | grep "declare -f \x${hex}" | xxd fi elif ! declare -pF | grep -q "declare -f \x${hex}"; then echo "${x} works, but is difficult in bash" fi fi ) done

Some additional notes:

  • Characters 1-31 are less than ideal, as they are more difficult to type.
  • Characters 128-255 are even less ideal in bash (except on bash 3.2 on macOS. It might be compiled differently?) because commands like declare -pF do not render the special characters, even though they are there in memory. This means any introspection code will incorrectly assume that these functions are not there. However, features like compgen still correctly render the characters.
  • Out of my testing scope, but some unicode does work too, although it's extra hard to paste/type on macOS over ssh.
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4

From 3.3 Shell Functions:

Shell functions are a way to group commands for later execution using a single name for the group. They are executed just like a "regular" command. When the name of a shell function is used as a simple command name, the list of commands associated with that function name is executed. Shell functions are executed in the current shell context; no new process is created to interpret them.

Functions are declared using this syntax:

name () compound-command [ redirections ]

or

function name [()] compound-command [ redirections ]

and from 2 Definitions:

name

A word consisting solely of letters, numbers, and underscores, and beginning with a letter or underscore. Names are used as shell variable and function names. Also referred to as an identifier.

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2 Comments

The rule for function names and variable names is slightly different. For example, function names can have a . or a - (and other special characters too) in them, but not shell variables.
See this answer for more accurate description of this.
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This script tests all valid chars for function names with 1 char.

It outputs 53 valid chars (a-zA-Z and underscore) using
a POSIX shell and 220 valid chars with BASH v4.4.12.

The Answer from Ron Burk is valid, but lacks the numbers.

#!/bin/sh FILE='/tmp/FOO' I=0 VALID=0 while [ $I -lt 256 ]; do { NAME="$( printf \\$( printf '%03o' $I ))" I=$(( I + 1 )) >"$FILE" ( eval "$NAME(){ rm $FILE;}; $NAME" 2>/dev/null ) if [ -f "$FILE" ]; then rm "$FILE" else VALID=$(( VALID + 1 )) echo "$VALID/256 - OK: $NAME" fi } done
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1 Comment

Running code in a shell to determine what it can do is a very good way to test a shell. You may want to change to shebang line when running it in bash though.

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