bash: ending statements

2020-12-28

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~1 min read

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103 words

I was reviewing a bash script that I use recently and noticed the esac keyword. I hadn’t noticed it before, so I started looking into it a bit more and found that it signifies the end of a case statement.

This “reverse word” technique to mark the end of a code block apparently has its roots in the ALGOL68 language’s expressions

  • if is closed with fi
  • case is closed with esac
  • do is od, but in bash it has been replaced with done, likely to avoid conflicting with octal dump. Similarly done is used for for, while, and until loops.


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