How to concatenate string variables in Bash

Question

In PHP, strings are concatenated together as follows:

$foo = \"Hello\";
$foo .= \" World\";

Here, $foo becomes \"Hello World\"

Answer 1

I wanted to build a string from a list. Couldn't find an answer for that so I post it here. Here is what I did:

list=(1 2 3 4 5)
string=''

for elm in "${list[@]}"; do
    string="${string} ${elm}"
done

echo ${string}

and then I get the following output:

1 2 3 4 5

Answer 2

bla=hello
laber=kthx
echo "${bla}ohai${laber}bye"

Will output

helloohaikthxbye

This is useful when $blaohai leads to a variable not found error. Or if you have spaces or other special characters in your strings. "${foo}" properly escapes anything you put into it.

Answer 3

$ a=hip
$ b=hop
$ ab=$a$b
$ echo $ab
hiphop
$ echo $a$b
hiphop

Answer 4

Even if the += operator is now permitted, it has been introduced in Bash 3.1 in 2004.

Any script using this operator on older Bash versions will fail with a "command not found" error if you are lucky, or a "syntax error near unexpected token".

For those who cares about backward compatibility, stick with the older standard Bash concatenation methods, like those mentioned in the chosen answer:

foo="Hello"
foo="$foo World"
echo $foo
> Hello World

Answer 5

In my opinion, the simplest way to concatenate two strings is to write a function that does it for you, then use that function.

function concat ()
{
    prefix=$1
    suffix=$2

    echo "${prefix}${suffix}"
}

foo="Super"
bar="man"

concat $foo $bar   # Superman

alien=$(concat $foo $bar)

echo $alien        # Superman

Answer 6

Here is a concise summary of what most answers are talking about.

Let's say we have two variables and $1 is set to 'one':

set one two
a=hello
b=world

The table below explains the different contexts where we can combine the values of a and b to create a new variable, c.

Context                               | Expression            | Result (value of c)
--------------------------------------+-----------------------+---------------------
Two variables                         | c=$a$b                | helloworld
A variable and a literal              | c=${a}_world          | hello_world
A variable and a literal              | c=$1world             | oneworld
A variable and a literal              | c=$a/world            | hello/world
A variable, a literal, with a space   | c=${a}" world"        | hello world
A more complex expression             | c="${a}_one|${b}_2"   | hello_one|world_2
Using += operator (Bash 3.1 or later) | c=$a; c+=$b           | helloworld
Append literal with +=                | c=$a; c+=" world"     | hello world

A few notes:

• enclosing the RHS of an assignment in double quotes is generally a good practice, though it is quite optional in many cases
• += is better from a performance standpoint if a big string is being constructed in small increments, especially in a loop
• use {} around variable names to disambiguate their expansion (as in row 2 in the table above). As seen on rows 3 and 4, there is no need for {} unless a variable is being concatenated with a string that starts with a character that is a valid first character in shell variable name, that is alphabet or underscore.

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See also:

• BashFAQ/013 - How can I concatenate two variables?
• When do we need curly braces around shell variables?