Today I learned that in addition to the usual ways of uppercasing strings, Bash 4 brought the addition of case modification operators to the parameter substitution family.

Spending a pleasant coffee on my day off today I looked at tackling another challenge in Exercism's bash track - Acronym. The requirement included ensuring that any generated acronym (I guess these might actually be initialisms, but that's a discussion for another time) was completely in uppercase, regardless of the source.

In my solution, I resorted to the usual use of tr, like this:

tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]'

All good. I like to peruse others' solutions, to learn from how they might have tackled the same challenge, and I came across something that looked rather odd at first, as I'd never seen it before. It was a solution by TopKech and looks like this:

OUTPUT=$(echo "$1" | sed -e 's/$/ /' -e 's/\([^ \-]\)[^ \-]*[ \-]/\1/g' -e 's/^ *//')
echo ${OUTPUT^^}

What's that ^^ in the second line?

Turns out that it's a case modification operator, within a parameter substitution context. What's more, it is "relatively" new, in that it was introduced with version 4 of Bash. I say "relatively", as version 4 was introduced way back in 2009; but having been a macOS user for a while, I'd been stuck with version 3 due to Apple's issues with the GPL v3 licence (prompting them not to ship any version beyond 3, and even go so far as to make zsh the default shell on newer versions of the OS).

Version 4 of Bash came with lots of wonderful stuff, including 4 separate case modification operators, that are illustrated in the Advanced Bash Scripting Guide - Chapter 37. Bash, versions 2, 3, and 4 and can be summarised thus:

|-|-| |${var^}|Make first char of var value uppercase| |${var^^}|Make all chars of var value uppercase| |${var,}|Make first char of var value lowercase| |${var,,}|Make all chars of var value lowercase|

I didn't know that, but I do now!