Fixing "zsh: bad assignment" error in Linux
The other day I was trying to create an alias in Linux for repetitive commands. An alias is a name that is translated as another name or command (or a set of commands).
So, I tried to create the alias in the following manner:
And it threw me the following error:
If you are a regular user of the Linux command line, you must have identified the error on the previous command. But I was preoccupied with my program in C++ and I did not notice the obvious error here.
In fact, I thought it to be an error with the way I used the combination of error for the alias. So, I fiddled for a couple of minutes and just to make sure what I was doing wrong, tried this command:
Now, I was certain that there was no error with the commands this time but I git the same result as above:
And that’s when I realized my mistake. You see, I have been working a lot with C++ and was following the standard of using spaces before and after the assignment operator (=). And that is what I used here as well. And shell does not like the wastage of “space”.
I removed the extra white spaces before and after the = and voilà! There it worked like a charm.
In fact, the same error can be encountered with the export command as well or any other variable assignments in the shell. There should not be spaces before and after equals sign.
This taught me a lesson to not waste white space while dealing with shell scripts and Linux commands. It’s not the same as writing programs in other languages.
I would add this tiny learning lesson to my list of things to know about the Linux terminal.
I hope you would not have to waste your time with this problem if you mind those spaces before and after the equals sign.
Abhishek Prakash
Created It's FOSS 11 years ago to share my Linux adventures. Have a Master's degree in Engineering and years of IT industry experience. Huge fan of Agatha Christie detective mysteries 🕵️♂️
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Periodically source shell profile
I'm a zsh user, but this should apply to any shell in theory. When I edit my .zshrc to add a new alias, I have to source ~/.zshrc in all of my open terminal tabs/windows to be able to use the new alias. I'm wondering if there's some way to have my open shells periodically source my profile automatically.
- .bash-profile
3 Answers 3
The most complex and most real-time solution is to write a user trap function in .zshrc which when the trapped signal is caught, sources .zshrc itself.
Within zsh, this can be seen now:
Now some change in .zshrc
Here comes the tricky part. Using inotify watching .zshrc or by a watcher script that examines the last modification of .zshrc a command is triggered that sends USR1 signal to all zsh processes of the user. Now I just ran it in another shell:
And the result is:
- Very interesting approach. However, I'd rather use killall -s USR1 zsh than this ps-awk-xargs construct. – mpy Feb 20, 2016 at 9:12
- Valid correction. Thx! – user556625 Feb 20, 2016 at 9:14
How about aliasing the command you use regularly?
You may need to adapt this for zsh:
So when you vi anything, it will source ~/.zshrc
You could do this with cd or ls for example.
Another option would be to build it into your prompt:
- Thanks for the suggestions! I've already built it into the command I use to edit my profile, but that only helps with the shell that I edited it from. Building it into my prompt seems more promising... Have you tried that? – swrobel Feb 19, 2016 at 1:13
- @swrobel No, I haven't tried it specifically, but it should work fine - you must escape the first $ otherwise it only runs the first time – Paul Feb 19, 2016 at 1:22
- Hmm, the export results in the following error and no prompt: /Users/swrobel/.zshrc:export:8: not valid in this context: ~.zshrc}u@h:w$ zsh: bad substitution – swrobel Feb 19, 2016 at 1:58
- Sorry, fixed the typos. @swrobel – Paul Feb 19, 2016 at 2:29
You are absolutly right, this function might be constructed in any shell, and so since more than a quarter of century.
It is not, and from my point of vue here is why. Such a function could lead to a fatal termination of all shells running in case of a slightest error. Example: you have a code section for debugging which contains
and during editing session of your .zshrc you removed the code protecting this exit to make it the general rule. All your running zsh will end. You won't be able to start another one with the same userid to fix your .zshrc . You will have to use another account which is sudo enabled to fix the killer .zshrc .
Then the best practice is to always test a .zshrc in a newly created shell so as to be able to survive.
This missing function is a very wise one.
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How to make a permanent alias in oh-my-zsh?
In my .zshrc I tried to make a few aliases .I looked into a lot of places, but I couldn't find out a way that worked. I used this code below:
Then I wrote a command source ~/.zshrc . Still it didn't resolve the issue. I get error messages like zsh: command not found: j
Could anyone help me with any suggestions and let me know what am I doing wrong?
- command-line
- 4 Judging from the (mutliple) comments and from the error I suppose each alias is actually set on a single line, correct? – kos Apr 17, 2016 at 22:49
There must not be any whitespaces around between = and either alias name or alias definition:
BTW: If you are looking for a way to shorten directory names, I suggest looking into Named Directories and the AUTO_CD option instead of aliases:
This allows you to use ~w instead of ~/Documents/UoMWorkspace/Semester2 and ~j instead of ~/Documents/UoMWorkspace/Semester2/COMP17412 (or ~w/COMP17412 ). So cd ~j is identical to cd ~/Documents/UoMWorkspace/Semester2 . It also works as part of a path, e.g. cat ~j/somedir/somefile .
zsh will automatically cd to a directory if it is given as command on the command line and it is not the name of an actual command. e.g.
- 1 As a further explanation why not use spaces before and after the equation sign:e.g. a = b : This will be considered as a command a with two parameters ( b and = ) and will throw an error: zsh: command not found: a . If you put alias before that ( alias a = b ), it will be somehow similar. – Timo Oct 22, 2017 at 7:29
- 1 Isn't that AUTO_CD cause your command history unreadable? – nanono Apr 18, 2020 at 3:34
- 2 @nanono That depends on what you mean by "unreadable". By itself AUTO_CD does nothing more than allow to switch into directories by only using their paths instead of using the cd command. Of course, if you make active use of this feature, it is not easy to tell from the history whether the command docs ran a executable of that name or if it was used to switch into a directory named "docs". – Adaephon Apr 21, 2020 at 15:04
- Special thanks for shortening directories names - I have been looking for it – bora89 Jan 7, 2021 at 14:08
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Error: ZSH_HIGHLIGHT_STYLES: assignment to invalid subscript range #359
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Open the file /Users/me/.zshrc [this is the file where you were trying to add the path for Python] Look for the line that is missing a '', and add that ''. [most likely it's going to be the line you added with Python], so look there first. Save your file and exit.
An alias is a name that is translated as another name or command (or a set of commands). So, I tried to create the alias in the following manner: alias my_short_command = "command 1; command 2 && command 3; command 4". And it threw me the following error: zsh: bad assignment. If you are a regular user of the Linux command line, you must have ...
foo=\ bar. proper assignment; now the value of foo is bar (note the leading space) foo-x=bar. command foo-x=bar (because foo-x is not a valid name for a shell variable) This is not specific to Zsh. The POSIX shell ( sh) and POSIX-compliant shells behave this way. Zsh (while not being POSIX-compliant in general) also follows.
You script is executed by Bash. Reading your .zshrc with Bash doesn't work but gets you errors for all the Zsh specific stuff.. Your script runs in its own subshell. As settings, environment variables and such are not exported back to the calling shell ascript will not work here.
This is similar to #263 but I get a different error: (eval):15: bad assignment As a result, all plugin aliases are gone. I'm using the zsh calc plugin, which aliases the =. When I remove this plugin, I get no errors and got all plugin al...
1. If you run your script with -x (both bash and zsh) you will see that the $ (...) code gets interpreted/parsed differently. This is because, as stated in the FAQ, word splitting in zsh is backwards/bash/sh incompatible. You can use SH_WORD_SPLIT to address this difference.
From the zsh manual regarding the typeset builtin (which local is a special case of): Unlike parameter assignment statements, typeset 's exit status on an assignment that involves a command substitution does not reflect the exit status of the command substitution.
It's a parent- v. child-shell difference. When you run test.sh, a new shell is started to run it; the variable is exported within that shell.That means the new shell is aware of it, and any of its own children. The parent shell, the one you started test.sh from, isn't affected at all (and can't be).. To see the variable in your current shell, you need to source the script instead:
Using inotify watching .zshrc or by a watcher script that examines the last modification of .zshrc a command is triggered that sends USR1 signal to all zsh processes of the user. Now I just ran it in another shell: ~$ ps -a | awk '$4=="zsh" {print $1}' | xargs kill -SIGUSR1. And the result is:
The first issue is, that =foo.sh should get resolved first (absolute path of "foo.sh", if any), and then looked at by type.. The second minor issue appears to be that the suffix aliases setup by zsh-mime-setup should not get considered to be an alias, if they are a command/executable file maybe.
export in zsh is shorthand for typeset -gx, where the attribute g means "global" (as opposed to local to a function) and the attribute x means "exported" (i.e. in the environment). Thus: typeset +x GREP_OPTIONS This also works in ksh and bash. If you never export GREP_OPTIONS in the first place, you don't need to unexport it.. You can also use the indirect, portable way: unsetting a ...
# Set personal aliases, overriding those provided by oh-my-zsh libs, # plugins, and themes. Aliases can be placed here, though oh-my-zsh # users are encouraged to define aliases within the ZSH_CUSTOM folder. # For a full list of active aliases, run alias.
using ZSH mac latest. In .zshrc I have: export ZSH="~/.oh-my-zsh" that directory exists: cd ~/.oh-my-zsh me@Imac-Retina-2 .oh-my-zsh % ls CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md README.md lib/ oh-my-zsh.sh-SAVED themes/ CONTRIBUTING.md cache/ log/ plugins/ tools/ LICENSE.txt custom/ oh-my-zsh.sh templates/
In zsh, Command Substitution result was performed word splitting if was not enclosed in double quotes. So if your command substitution result contain any whitespace, tab, or newline, the export command will be broken into parts: $ export a=$(echo 1 -2) export: not valid in this context: -2. You need to double quote command substitution to make ...
To create a permanent environment variable in zsh, you'd have to make changes in the zsh config file. First, open the zshrc file using the following command: nano ~/.zshrc. Go to the end of the file in Nano to write new lines using Alt + / and create new environment variables using the following syntax: export VARIABLE_NAME=VARIABLE_VALUE.
~ /brackets-highlighter.zsh|32 error| bad substitution. This is the source code of brackets-highlighter.zsh: Define default styles.: ${ZSH_HIGHLIGHT_STYLES[bracket-error]:=fg=red,bold} ... moved the highlight styles assignment to after sourcing zsh-syntax-highlighting.zsh. So yeah. I think I should look into zsh package managers like antigen ...
4. The problem is the variable name. LINES is one of the variables with a conventional meaning. Its meaning is to convey the number of lines in a terminal. There is a similar variable COLUMNS. One of the jobs of an interactive shell is to update these two variables when the terminal is resized. Both bash and zsh do this.
path+=/path/to/go export PATH None of these have worked as expected. As mentioned before, when I do this through the terminal, it works fine, but I want this to be a persistent setting. Any help/input is appreciated. ... after source ~/.zshrc, zsh terminal does not work. Hot Network Questions
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Aliases can be placed here, though oh-my-zsh # users are encouraged to define aliases within the ZSH_CUSTOM folder. # For a full list of active aliases, run `alias`. # # Example aliases # alias zshconfig="mate ~/.zshrc"