concatenate strings in bash

February 12th, 2007 by Lawrence David

let’s say you’ve got:

$j=”foo”

and you’d like to tack on its good partner ‘bar’. then, use the dollar sign and curly braces to delineate variable from string:

$k=”${j}bar”

check out the other tips and tricks i've compiled on these pages. you might learn something else interesting!

on 17 Jul 2007 at 6:59 am bela

Thank a lot
on 23 Jul 2007 at 11:26 am anyonymous

holy crap, thanks a lot man. a search on Google reveals nothing but extremely bad examples and explain nothing.
on 02 Aug 2007 at 10:45 am Arun Arunachalam

Bulls eye.. I just got exactly what I needed.
on 24 Sep 2007 at 2:01 pm Ben

I think it should be like this:
k=“${j}bar”
on 24 Sep 2007 at 2:24 pm Lawrence David

nice catch ben; duly updated!
on 31 Oct 2007 at 11:01 am Sam

Thanks!
on 16 Nov 2007 at 6:33 pm Amy

thanks!! Very helpful!!
on 27 Dec 2007 at 8:58 am spook

IMHO a simpler solution would be:

#!/bin/bash
j=”foo”
k=”bar”
concatenation=”$j$k”
echo j: $j
echo k: $k
echo j+k: $concatenation

This will produce:
j: foo
k: bar
j+k: foobar
on 04 Feb 2008 at 5:36 pm Robert

Outstanding!
on 19 Mar 2008 at 11:32 pm xer0

Just leave out those citation marks…

[jakob@kage ~]$ j=”foo”
[jakob@kage ~]$ k=”bar”
[jakob@kage ~]$ concatenation=”$j$k”
[jakob@kage ~]$ echo $concatenation
””foo””bar””

^^
on 03 Nov 2008 at 1:21 pm rmiller

you don’t get into trouble until you stat with
complicated file names -

PTH=”/work/dir/test”
DTE=”2008/10/31″

FILENAME=${PTH}/${DTE}_suffix.out

this practice guarantees it will work

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