Define function in unix/linux command line (e.g. BASH)
Quoting my answer for a similar question on Ask Ubuntu:
Functions in
bash
are essentially named compound commands (or code blocks). Fromman bash
:Compound Commands A compound command is one of the following: ... { list; } list is simply executed in the current shell environment. list must be terminated with a newline or semicolon. This is known as a group command. ... Shell Function Definitions A shell function is an object that is called like a simple command and executes a compound command with a new set of positional parameters. ... [C]ommand is usually a list of commands between { and }, but may be any command listed under Compound Commands above.
There's no reason given, it's just the syntax.
Try with a semicolon after wc -l
:
numresults(){ ls "$1"/RealignerTargetCreator | wc -l; }
Don't use ls | wc -l
as it may give you wrong results if file names have newlines in it. You can use this function instead:
numresults() { find "$1" -mindepth 1 -printf '.' | wc -c; }