Echo command, and then run it? (Like make)

Question

Is there some way to get bash into a sort of verbose mode where, such that, when it\'s running a shell script, it echoes out the command it\'s going to run before running it? T

Answer 1

To answer the second part of your question, here's a shell function that does what you want:

echo_and_run() { echo "$*" ; "$@" ; }

I use something similar to this:

echo_and_run() { echo "\$ $*" ; "$@" ; }

which prints $ in front of the command (it looks like a shell prompt and makes it clearer that it's a command). I sometimes use this in scripts when I want to show some (but not all) of the commands it's executing.

As others have mentioned, it does lose quotation marks:

$ echo_and_run echo "Hello, world"
$ echo Hello, world
Hello, world
$ 

but I don't think there's any good way to avoid that; the shell strips quotation marks before echo_and_run gets a chance to see them. You could write a script that would check for arguments containing spaces and other shell metacharacters and add quotation marks as needed (which still wouldn't necessarily match the quotation marks you actually typed).