Elegant way for verbose mode in scripts?

As you noticed, you can define some log functions like log, log_debug, log_error, etc.

function log () {
    if [[ $_V -eq 1 ]]; then
        echo "$@"
    fi
}

It can help increasing your main code readability and hide show\nonshow logic into logging function.

log "some text"

If _V(global variable) is equal 1 "some text" will be printed, in other case it will not.

After reading all other posts I came up with this

# set verbose level to info
__VERBOSE=6

declare -A LOG_LEVELS
# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syslog#Severity_level
LOG_LEVELS=([0]="emerg" [1]="alert" [2]="crit" [3]="err" [4]="warning" [5]="notice" [6]="info" [7]="debug")
function .log () {
  local LEVEL=${1}
  shift
  if [ ${__VERBOSE} -ge ${LEVEL} ]; then
    echo "[${LOG_LEVELS[$LEVEL]}]" "$@"
  fi
}

Then you can simply use it like this

# verbose error
.log 3 "Something is wrong here"

Which will output

[error] Something is wrong here