Bash is clearly an excellent shell and one that most Unix users are familiar with, but it may be far more customizable than many of us realize. Ever hear of shopt? It’s a built-in that allows you to change how bash deals with command history, sources files, spell checking, and a lot more.
Think of shopt as “shell options”. Whether you choose to pronounce shopt as “shop-tee” or “shopped” doesn’t matter at all, but knowing how the command works and what it does can come in quite handy every now and then.
Being a built-in means, of course, that you’re not going to find shopt with the which command and it won’t have its own man page. If you run the command “man shopt” and page through about 50 screens, you’ll get a brief introduction to the command and an explanation of the shell options that you can manipulate with it.
For starters, shopt’s -s option (without any arguments) will show you which of its settings are currently in force. By default, you’ll see something like this:
$ shopt -s checkwinsize on cmdhist on expand_aliases on extquote on force_fignore on hostcomplete on interactive_comments on login_shell on progcomp on promptvars on sourcepath on
If you want to see the settings which aren’t enabled, use shopt -u. And, if you want to see all 40 of them, type just shopt.
$ shopt -u | head -5 autocd off cdable_vars off cdspell off checkhash off checkjobs off
Type shopt followed by any of its possible settings will show you whether that setting is enabled or not.
$ shopt cdspell cdspell off
As you can see, one of the settings that you might like to try out, cdspell, is turned off by default. It’s one that can help if you frequently misspell pathnames. For example, with this setting enabled, you can get past the transpositions of characters in commands like the one shown below.
$ mkdir mydir/save $ cd mydir/svae mydir/save $ pwd /home/myself/mydir/save
Type just shopt on the command line, on the other hand, and you’ll see a list of all of its various settings whether they’re currently in force or not. At least you will if you’re using bash or a related shell.
$ shopt | head -10 autocd off cdable_vars off cdspell off checkhash off checkjobs off checkwinsize on cmdhist on compat31 off compat32 off compat40 off
The cmdhist option is an interesting setting. On by default, if you turn it off, run a multi-line command, and then check your history, you will see something like this:
849 for file in `ls` 850 do 851 echo $file is my favorite file 852 done 853 history
Notice what’s different here? Each line of the command is stored in a different history line. Normally, a command like this would look like this in our history buffer:
840 for file in `ls`; do echo $file is my favorite file; done
If you’re setting up a complex “for” line and want to use it to repeat a series of commands, separating the for line like this might make a lot of sense.
To re-enable the setting (i.e., turn it back on), use the shopt -s cmdhist command.
Expanding an alias means using the command that an alias is set to represent so if you set target to be equal to a long pathname e.g., alias target=”cd /opt/apps/mapper/current/data/stats/operational/logs” you can use “target” to move into the deeply buried directory. Basically, it allows aliases to be used in place of commands.
If you have the expand_aliases option turned off, on the other hand, this doesn’t happen.
$ alias target="cd /opt/apps/mapper/current/data/stats/operational/logs" $ target $ pwd /opt/apps/mapper/current/data/stats/operational/logs $ cd $ shopt expand_aliases expand_aliases on $ shopt -u expand_aliases $ target -bash: target: command not found
One rather unexpected behavior associated with bash is that, if you source a script without providing a pathname for the script, it will look down your search path before it looks in the current directory.
You can turn off this behavior with the shopt -u sourcepath command. In the example below, we see that sourcing the showmypath script runs the script in the bin directory rather than the one in the current directory if the sourcepath option is set (as it is by default). If that option is turned off, it runs the one in the current directory.
$ source showmypath /home/myself/bin $ shopt -u sourcepath $ source showmypath /home/myself
The script in this example reports its actual location using the command shown below.
#!/bin/bash
echo "$( cd "$( dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" )" && pwd )"
The various settings that you can manipulate using shopt allow you to change the nature of bash. Though the shell’s defaults generally mean that the shell will make the most sensible choices, it’s useful at times to know what you can change and how.
