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Suppose I have a function "func" which gets two arguments "a" and "b" and returns something. For some reason I can't manage echo what I get from the function.

This is what I tried:

value=$(func $a $b)
echo $value
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Since you didn't show your function definition, this is only a guess, but I'm pretty confident it's a good one.

You need to understand that a function in shell fits into the language as if it was a command, i.e. a separate program, and the return keyword is analogous to exit. You can only return small integers, and the caller sees them in $?, just like the exit value of any other command.

Functions can also output a result to stdout by using echo (or any other command that prints to stdout), and then the result can be caputred with $(func args ...)

So you probably just need to change return to echo in your function.

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2 Comments

My function returns using "return" statement, since I want to finish the function once it returns some value.
So change it to an echo followed by a return 0 if you want the function to be considered successful, or return 1 if you want it to fail. Just like writing an independent program - you do your output then exit. Except the "exit" from a shell function is spelled "return".

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