up vote 19 down vote favorite
1

If I try to run a;;b in sh, I get this error:

sh: <number>: Syntax error: ";;" unexpected

If I try a;;;b I get the same error, not ;;; instead of ;;, so I think that ;; means something, although I don't know what does it mean.

Here is an example:

$ echo A;;echo B
sh: 1: Syntax error: ";;" unexpected
$ echo A;;;echo B
sh: 1: Syntax error: ";;" unexpected
$ echo A; ;echo B
sh: 1: Syntax error: ";" unexpected

Here you can see that when I use ; ; instead of ;; the error is different, pertaining to the fact that I used ; without a command before. ;; seems to be a different operator, although I don't know what it applies to.

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Can't search on Google because of the ;;, and haven't found a dupe here. – Έρικ Κωνσταντόπουλος yesterday
3  
Googled "sh double semicolon" ... stackoverflow.com/questions/16905183/… – muru yesterday
    
@muru Although not posted here yet I think. – Έρικ Κωνσταντόπουλος yesterday
up vote 36 down vote accepted

;; separates statements in a case...esac construct in Bourne-like shells:

case foo in (a) cmd1; cmd2 ;; (b) cmd3; cmd4; esac

To find out about a command, you can run man that-command. If your pager is less, you can search within the man page by pressing /.

Here, you'd run man sh and search for ;;. Some shells support other operators to separate case statements (like ;& in ksh93/zsh/bash/mksh, &| in zsh/mksh, ;;& in bash).

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I just posted here because I think there should be such a question here anyways, since here it could be explained in a clearer way if someone is confused. – Έρικ Κωνσταντόπουλος 23 hours ago
    
If there are lots of hits, or you can't remember the escaping rules for searching with less, it's sometimes handy to $ man bash|grep -C1 ';;' – unhammer 1 hour ago

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