What does echo $((2#$1)) exactly do?
man bash
echo [-neE] [arg ...]
Output the args, separated by spaces, followed by a newline.
The return status is 0 unless a write error occurs. If -n is
specified, the trailing newline is suppressed. If the -e option
is given, interpretation of the following backslash-escaped
characters is enabled.
[...]
Arithmetic Expansion
Arithmetic expansion allows the evaluation of an arithmetic expression
and the substitution of the result. The format for arithmetic expan‐
sion is:
$((expression))
[...]
Constants with a leading 0 are interpreted as octal numbers. A leading
0x or 0X denotes hexadecimal. Otherwise, numbers take the form
[base#]n, where the optional base is a decimal number between 2 and 64
representing the arithmetic base, and n is a number in that base. If
base# is omitted, then base 10 is used. When specifying n, the digits
greater than 9 are represented by the lowercase letters, the uppercase
letters, @, and _, in that order. If base is less than or equal to 36,
lowercase and uppercase letters may be used interchangeably to repre‐
sent numbers between 10 and 35.
From the Doc at: https://tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/bash/bashref.html#Shell-Arithmetic
Constants with a leading 0 are interpreted as octal numbers. A leading ‘0x’ or ‘0X’ denotes hexadecimal. Otherwise, numbers take the form [base#]n, where the optional base is a decimal number between 2 and 64 representing the arithmetic base, and n is a number in that base. If base# is omitted, then base 10 is used. When specifying n, the digits greater than 9 are represented by the lowercase letters, the uppercase letters, ‘@’, and ‘_’, in that order. If base is less than or equal to 36, lowercase and uppercase letters may be used interchangeably to represent numbers between 10 and 35.
So echo $((16#FF))
outputs 255
and echo $((2#0110))
outputs 6
Ipor's answer is excellent but very slightly incomplete. The quoted part of the bash man page states that the [base#]n
syntax works only for constants, and 2#$1
is not a constant. You should be asking how this really works!
EXPANSION
Expansion is performed on the command line after it has been split into words. There are seven kinds of expansion performed: brace expansion, tilde expansion, parameter and variable expansion, command substitution, arithmetic expansion, word splitting, and pathname expansion.
The order of expansions is: brace expansion; tilde expansion, parameter and variable expansion, arithmetic expansion, and command substitution (done in a left-to-right fashion); word splitting; and pathname expansion.
Basically Bash is doing variable substitution first, so that the $1
is first replaced with its value. Only then does it do arithmetic expansion, which sees only a proper constant.