I am beginner to Shell scripting.
I have used a variable to store value A="MyScript". I tried to concatenate the string in subsequent steps $A_new. To my surprise it didn't work and $A.new worked.
Could you please help me in understanding these details?
Thanks
Shell variable names are composed of alphabetic characters, numbers and underscores.
3.231 Name
In the shell command language, a word consisting solely of underscores, digits, and alphabetics from the portable character set. The first character of a name is not a digit.
So when you wrote $A_new the shell interpreted the underscore (and new) as part of the variable name and expanded the variable A_new.
A period is not valid in a variable name so when the shell parsed $A.new for a variable to expand it stopped at the period and expanded the A variable.
The ${A} syntax is designed to allow this to work as intended here.
You can use any of the following to have this work correctly (in rough order of preferability):
echo "${A}_new"echo "$A"_newecho $A\_newThe last is least desirable because you can't quote the whole string (or the \ doesn't get removed. So since you should basically always quote your variable expansions you would end up probably doing echo "$A"\_new but that's no different then point 2 ultimately so why bother.
This happens because the underscore is the valid character in variable names. Try this way: ${A}_new or "$A"_new
$A_new, in fact, is ${A_new}.
${A}_new not {$A}_new.The name of a variable can contain letters ( a to z or A to Z), numbers ( 0 to 9) or the underscore character ( _).
Shell does not require any variable declaration as in programming languages as C , C++ or java. So when you write $A_new shell consider A_new as a variable, which you have not assigned any value therefore it comes to be null.
To achieve what you mentioned use as :
${A}_new
Its always a good practice to enclose variable names in braces after $ sign to avoid such situation.
