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I have a bash script where I define UTF-8 Greek Symbols in a file named greek-utfb.sh. I want to run tests that display the variables for printing the greek letters in the file greek-utfb-scout.

--- greek-utfb.sh ----

utfb-greek ()
{
  Alph="\u0391"   # Alpha
  Beta="\u0392"   # Beta
  Gamm="\u0393"   # Gamma
  Delt="\u0394"   # Delta
  Epsi="\u0395"   # Epsilon
}

--- greek-utfb-scout.sh ---

greek-utf-scout ()
{
  echo -e "Alph: $Alph"
  echo -e "Beta: $Beta"
  echo -e "Gamm: $Gamm"
  echo -e "Delt: $Delt"
  echo -e "Epsi: $Epsi"
}

What do I have to add in greek-utfb-scout.sh to be able to translate the greek variables in greek-utfb.sh.

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1 Answer 1

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First, don't put the variable definitions inside a function. Instead, change greek-utfb.sh to look like this:

#!/bin/sh
Alph="\u0391"   # Alpha
Beta="\u0392"   # Beta
Gamm="\u0393"   # Gamma
Delt="\u0394"   # Delta
Epsi="\u0395"   # Epsilon

Now source this file in greek-utfb-scout.sh:

#!/bin/sh

. greek-utfb.sh

greek-utf-scout ()
{
  echo -e "Alph: $Alph"
  echo -e "Beta: $Beta"
  echo -e "Gamm: $Gamm"
  echo -e "Delt: $Delt"
  echo -e "Epsi: $Epsi"
}

After running . greek-utfb-scout.sh, the function now works as expected:

$ . greek-utfb-scout.sh
$ greek-utf-scout
Alph: Α
Beta: Β
Gamm: Γ
Delt: Δ
Epsi: Ε
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  • More info: What's the meaning of a dot before a command in shell? source and . builtins are synonyms in Bash; . is the portable one. If the shebang of the "calling" script is #!/bin/sh then you should use .. +1 anyway because sourcing is the answer. Commented Aug 12, 2021 at 10:04
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    The size of the string plus a few bytes (cue "how long is a piece of string?" joke), which depends on what's in the string variable and how many bytes each character takes. Without details, one can only guess: best case, a few thousand bytes for all your vars. worst case, several hundred thousand bytes or even a few million. On a system with probably gigabytes of memory, that's irrelevant. A potentially bigger problem than memory usage is the efficiency of the tree structure and algorithm used to store and access thousands or tens/hundreds of thousands of variable names and their values. Commented Aug 13, 2021 at 2:51
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