The Computer Oracle

What does echo $((2#$1)) exactly does?

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Track title: Hypnotic Puzzle4

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Chapters
00:00 What Does Echo $((2#$1)) Exactly Does?
00:27 Accepted Answer Score 76
01:04 Answer 2 Score 31
02:01 Answer 3 Score 26
02:53 Thank you

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Full question
https://superuser.com/questions/1162555/...

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Content licensed under CC BY-SA
https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/lice...

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Tags
#bash

#avk47



ACCEPTED ANSWER

Score 76


man bash

   echo [-neE] [arg ...]
          Output  the  args,  separated  by spaces, followed by a newline.
          The return status is 0 unless a write error occurs.   If  -n  is
          specified, the trailing newline is suppressed.  If the -e option
          is given,  interpretation  of  the  following  backslash-escaped
          characters  is  enabled.

[...]

   Arithmetic Expansion
       Arithmetic  expansion allows the evaluation of an arithmetic expression
       and the substitution of the result.  The format for  arithmetic  expan‐
       sion is:

              $((expression))

[...]

   Constants with a leading 0 are interpreted as octal numbers.  A leading
   0x or  0X  denotes  hexadecimal.   Otherwise,  numbers  take  the  form
   [base#]n,  where the optional base is a decimal number between 2 and 64
   representing the arithmetic base, and n is a number in that  base.   If
   base#  is omitted, then base 10 is used.  When specifying n, the digits
   greater than 9 are represented by the lowercase letters, the  uppercase
   letters, @, and _, in that order.  If base is less than or equal to 36,
   lowercase and uppercase letters may be used interchangeably  to  repre‐
   sent numbers between 10 and 35.



ANSWER 2

Score 31


From the Doc at: https://tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/bash/bashref.html#Shell-Arithmetic

Constants with a leading 0 are interpreted as octal numbers. A leading ‘0x’ or ‘0X’ denotes hexadecimal. Otherwise, numbers take the form [base#]n, where the optional base is a decimal number between 2 and 64 representing the arithmetic base, and n is a number in that base. If base# is omitted, then base 10 is used. When specifying n, the digits greater than 9 are represented by the lowercase letters, the uppercase letters, ‘@’, and ‘_’, in that order. If base is less than or equal to 36, lowercase and uppercase letters may be used interchangeably to represent numbers between 10 and 35.

So echo $((16#FF)) outputs 255 and echo $((2#0110)) outputs 6




ANSWER 3

Score 26


Ipor's answer is excellent but very slightly incomplete. The quoted part of the bash man page states that the [base#]n syntax works only for constants, and 2#$1 is not a constant. You should be asking how this really works!

EXPANSION

    Expansion is performed on the command line after it has been split into words.  There are seven kinds of expansion performed: brace expansion, tilde expansion, parameter and variable expansion, command substitution, arithmetic expansion, word splitting, and pathname expansion.

    The order of expansions is: brace expansion; tilde expansion, parameter and variable expansion, arithmetic expansion, and command substitution (done in a left-to-right fashion); word splitting; and pathname expansion.

Basically Bash is doing variable substitution first, so that the $1 is first replaced with its value. Only then does it do arithmetic expansion, which sees only a proper constant.