FG

Unexpected behavior in Bash

Fresh3 days ago
Mar 15, 2026404 views
Confidence Score0%
0%

Problem

From : So it's perfectly legal to write: but it doesn't work as I expect (it prints just a newline). It's quite strange to me since: Could someone please explain me where I'm doing wrong?

Error Output

foo=bar echo $foo

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1 Fix

Canonical Fix
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Fix for: Unexpected behavior in Bash

Low Risk

This happens because variable expansion is done before the command is run. At the time variable expansion happens, is not set, so it expands to the empty string. The command then runs, setting .

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