When do we need curly braces around shell variables?

Question

In shell scripts, when do we use {} when expanding variables?

For example, I have seen the following:

var=10        # Declare variable

         


        

Answer 1

Variables are declared and assigned without $ and without {}. You have to use

var=10

to assign. In order to read from the variable (in other words, 'expand' the variable), you must use $.

$var      # use the variable
${var}    # same as above
${var}bar # expand var, and append "bar" too
$varbar   # same as ${varbar}, i.e expand a variable called varbar, if it exists.

This has confused me sometimes - in other languages we refer to the variable in the same way, regardless of whether it's on the left or right of an assignment. But shell-scripting is different, $var=10 doesn't do what you might think it does!