Bash Scripting – Concatenate String

In this article, we will see the concatenation of string in bash scripting.

Joining two or more strings together is called string concatenation. Bash does not have any built-in function to perform the concatenation on string data or variables. There are various methods using which we can perform the concatenation of strings in bash, those are :

Method 1: Write variables side by side

This is the easiest method to perform concatenation.

Example: Let’s take two strings (i.e., “welcome” and “to geeksforgeeks”), and we want to return a new string which is the combination of the given two strings. 

Code:

#!/bin/bash  
# Script to Concatenate Strings  
 
# Declaration of first String    
str1="Welcome"  
 
# Declaration of Second String  
str2=" to GeeksforGeeks."  
 
# Combining first and second string  
str3="$str1$str2"  
 
# print the concatenated string  
echo $str3  

Output:

Welcome to GeeksforGeeks.

Method 2: Using Double Quotes

It is also one of the easy methods to perform concatenation. This method uses variables inside the string, which is defined with double quotes. The advantage of using this method is we can concatenate the string variable at any position of the string data.

Example: Let’s concatenate two strings (i.e., “to” and “Welcome geeksforgeeks”) in such a way that it returns the result as “Welcome to GeeksforGeeks”.

Code:

#!/bin/bash  
# Concatenate Strings  
 
# Declaration of String Variable  
str="to"  
 
# Add the variable within the string  
echo "Welcome $str GeeksforGeeks."  

Output:

Welcome to GeeksforGeeks.

Method 3: Using printf function

printf is a function in bash that is used to print and concatenate the strings.

Syntax:

printf -v new_str “$str string_to_concatenate.” 

This command will concatenate the data present inside the double quotes and store the new string into the new_str variable. In this method also we can concatenate the string variable at any position.

Example: Let’s concatenate two strings (i.e., “to” and “Welcome geeksforgeeks”) in such a way that it returns the result as “Welcome to GeeksforGeeks”.

Code:

#!/bin/bash  
 
str="to"  
printf -v new_str "Welcome $str GeeksforGeeks."  
echo $new_str  

Output:

Welcome to GeeksforGeeks.

Method 4: Using Literal String

In this method, concatenation is performed with a literal string by using curly braces{}. It should be used in such a way that the variable does not mix up with the literal string.

Let’s concatenate two strings (i.e., “to” and “Welcome geeksforgeeks”) in such a way that it returns the result as “Welcome to GeeksforGeeks”.

Code:

#!/bin/bash  
 
str="to"  

# concatenation of strings  
new="Welcome ${str} GeeksforGeeks."  
echo "$new"

Output:

Welcome to GeeksforGeeks.

Method 5: Using Loop

This method is used when we have to concatenate strings present inside the list. 

Syntax:

newstr=" "
for value in list; 

do  

# Combining the list values using append operator  
Newstr+="$value "    
done 

Example

Code:

lang=""  

# for loop for reading the list  
for value in 'Welcome ''to ''GeeksforGeeks''!!';  

do  

# Combining the list values using append operator  
lang+="$value "    
done  

# Printing the combined values  
echo "$lang"  

Output:

Welcome to GeeksforGeeks!! 

Method 6: Using Any Character

If we want to concatenate strings separated by certain characters, we use this method. This is similar to writing variables side by side. 

In this method, we write variables side by side with the character in between.

Example: Let’s concatenate strings(‘Apple’, ‘Mango’, ‘Guava’, ‘Orange’) separated by comma(,) character.

Code:

str1="Apple"  
str2="Mango"  
str3="Guava"  
str4="Orange"  

# concatenate string using ','  
echo "$str1,$str2,$str3,$str4"  

Output:

Apple,Mango,Guava,Orange