String concatenation is a rather popular string operation in just about any programming language. When writing scripts with Bash, you might need to concatenate strings at times as well.
Now there are four ways you could concatenate strings in Bash as follows.
- By writing the string variables after one another
- By writing a string variable along with a literal string
- Using the shorthand (+=) operator
- By adding a character in between strings
We’ll be going over all four of the methods in this article.
Also read: How to exit Bash script?
Writing string variables after each other
One of the simplest ways of concatenating a string is to write the string variables after each other. Take a look at the following example.
str1 = "Candid."
str2 = "Technology"
str3 = "$str1$str2"
echo "$str3"The output of the above snippet would be the concatenated strings, that is, Candid.Technology.
Also read: Bash While loop explained
Writing a string variable with a literal string
Another common method of concatenating strings is to write a string variable enclosed in curly brackets and a string in one variable declaration.
str1 = "Candid."
str2 = "${str1}Technology"
echo "$str2"The above snippet will combine the str1 string variable with the literal string provided and will echo Candid.Technology.
Also read: Bash functions explained
Using the shorthand operator
The shorthand operator, +=, is also used to concatenate strings in Bash. You don’t even need a second variable when using the shorthand operator. It works just like it would with numerical values.
str1 = "Candid."
str1 +="Technology"
echo "$str1"The above snippet will combine the two strings and output Candid.Technology.
Also read: How to create Bash aliases?
By adding a character in between strings
Like you can concatenate strings by writing them one after another, you can also combine them by adding a character in between and declaring everything in one variable. This works great where you need to separate as usual.
str1 = "Candid"
str2 = "Technology"
str3 = "$str1.$str2"
echo "$str3"The above snippet will combine the two string variables with the period in between and output Candid.Technology.
Also read: How to check if a file or directory exists in Bash?
