Shell functions

Shell scripts do not have objects but do have functions.
Functions are more efficient than having scripts calling other scripts.

---

Example

A program to calculate how much space your web pages take up, as a percent of your total file space. Defines 2 functions, then uses them.

• Arithmetic in Shell

# percent $1 $2
# returns $1 as a percentage of $2

percent()
{
 temp=`expr $1 \* 100`
 expr $temp / $2
}


# sizeof dir
# returns size of all files in dir and below

sizeof()
{
 cd $1
 du | grep '\.$' | cut -f1 
}


web=`sizeof $HOME/public_html`
echo $web

total=`sizeof $HOME`
echo $total

ans=`percent $web $total`
echo "Your web files are $ans% of your total files."

On DCU Linux, du shows file size in k.
See also GUI - Disk Usage Analyser

---

Call function which is defined in another file

fnsfile:

   fn() 
   { 
    echo test 
   }

prog:

   # include functions defined in fnsfile:

   		. fnsfile
   # 		source fnsfile

   # can now call them:

   fn

---

Environment Variables

By default, functions have access to the caller's environment variables without exporting:

fn()
{
 echo $x
}

x=3

fn

Whereas if we call a separate script, it does not by default have access to the caller's environment variables.

---

Piping to a function:

You can pipe to functions too (in general you can treat them just like a separate program).

Consider a program:

#  killstring (string)
# kills all instances of program named by string
# e.g. 
#  killstring textedit
# kills all your textedit processes

If "killstring" first tries to identify these processes:

  ps -Tf | grep -i $1

when you type "killstring textedit" you get something like:

humphrys 28414 28413  0 12:32:50 pts/5    0:00 grep -i textedit
humphrys 28396     1  0 12:32:19 pts/23   0:00 textedit -geometry 600x600+200-100 f1
humphrys 28352     1  0 12:31:51 pts/23   0:00 textedit -geometry 600x600+200-100 f2
humphrys 28366     1  0 12:31:51 pts/23   0:00 textedit -geometry 600x600+200-100 f3
humphrys 28413 28073  0 12:32:50 pts/5    0:00 /bin/sh killstring textedit

so we need to strip out killstring itself, and the grep itself. We also have a number of unwieldy lines of text, which we want to process one by one, to extract the process ID and kill it. We can do this by piping to a function. So killstring looks like:

fn()
{
 while read user pid restofline
 do
  kill $pid
 done
}


ps -Tf | grep -i $1 | grep -v $0 | grep -v "grep -i $1" | fn