[linux] eval command in Bash and its typical uses

You asked about typical uses.

One common complaint about shell scripting is that you (allegedly) can't pass by reference to get values back out of functions.

But actually, via "eval", you can pass by reference. The callee can pass back a list of variable assignments to be evaluated by the caller. It is pass by reference because the caller can allowed to specify the name(s) of the result variable(s) - see example below. Error results can be passed back standard names like errno and errstr.

Here is an example of passing by reference in bash:

#!/bin/bash
isint()
{
    re='^[-]?[0-9]+$'
    [[ $1 =~ $re ]]
}

#args 1: name of result variable, 2: first addend, 3: second addend 
iadd()
{
    if isint ${2} && isint ${3} ; then
        echo "$1=$((${2}+${3}));errno=0"
        return 0
    else
        echo "errstr=\"Error: non-integer argument to iadd $*\" ; errno=329"
        return 1
    fi
}

var=1
echo "[1] var=$var"

eval $(iadd var A B)
if [[ $errno -ne 0 ]]; then
    echo "errstr=$errstr"
    echo "errno=$errno"
fi
echo "[2] var=$var (unchanged after error)"

eval $(iadd var $var 1)
if [[ $errno -ne 0 ]]; then
    echo "errstr=$errstr"
    echo "errno=$errno"
fi  
echo "[3] var=$var (successfully changed)"

The output looks like this:

[1] var=1
errstr=Error: non-integer argument to iadd var A B
errno=329
[2] var=1 (unchanged after error)
[3] var=2 (successfully changed)

There is almost unlimited band width in that text output! And there are more possibilities if the multiple output lines are used: e.g., the first line could be used for variable assignments, the second for continuous 'stream of thought', but that's beyond the scope of this post.

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