Give a function its own positional parameters.
Bash Scripts: A function receives its call arguments without replacing the caller’s positional parameters.
set -euo pipefail
set -- outer
show() { printf "%s\n" "$1"; }
show inner
printf "%s\n" "$1"Expected output EXAMPLE
inner outer
Details
Requires Bash 4 or later. Save as snippet.sh and run bash snippet.sh in an empty working directory. A function receives its call arguments without replacing the caller’s positional parameters.
Tested on Ubuntu 24.04.5 LTS · · GNU bash, version 5.2.21(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) · bash 5.2.21-2ubuntu4; coreutils 9.4-3ubuntu6.3
Test inputs, results and environment
The exact published code ran in a dedicated Linux test container with prepared inputs. Snippet process uid 65534 with a read-only root filesystem and temporary working files. Networking disabled. Fixtures and output records are isolated from the application database. Testing covers this example and its stated checks, not every input, operating system, or runtime version. The Linux container shares its host's kernel; this is not a native Windows test.
- Architecture / host kernel
- x86_64 / 6.18.54.1-microsoft-standard-WSL2
- Snippet identity / locale
- uid=65534, gid=65534 (unprivileged process) / C.UTF-8
- Interpreter invocation
bash -euo pipefail -c <published code>- Container image ID
sha256:ec91410a8f6ec3e985830b5e3a0560306d36f8c1c5ccd91a6699abe707123fa3- Code SHA-256
410142f37f27e283bb298f7644e18fda7c24bfb7d53428e4ee1c936db54e6dd5- Dependencies
- bash 5.2.21-2ubuntu4; coreutils 9.4-3ubuntu6.3
Test input setup
These are the prepared inputs used by the test harness. See Details above for the prerequisites and how to run this example.
# No input files required.
Observed standard output
inner outer
Exit code: 0. Standard error: empty. Validation: Exact stdout comparison. System-dependent values above are one recorded run.