On 10 Nov 2022, at 15:18, Maik Vermeulen via lists.yoctoproject.org <maik.vermeulen=lightyear.one@...> wrote:

Hi,

We have a shell function that's being called from a do_install task:
custom_install() {
DIR=$1
echo "Operating on '${DIR}'"

install <some params> -m 0644 ${S}/$DIR/<some file> \
${D}${some_path}/<some_file>
}

do_install() {
custom_install "dev"
}

The output of the above is:
Operating on 'dev'

exit 1 from 'install <some params> -m 0644 <recipe path>/1.0-r0/<expanded S folder>/${DIR}/<some file>
<recipe path>/image/<some_path>/<some_file>'

Why is ${DIR} expanded inside the echo, but not in the install command? I also tried with and without quotes, and with and without curly braces..
We are on poky sumo.

First, Sumo was last updated in 2019 and is very dead, please move to a supported release: https://wiki.yoctoproject.org/wiki/Releases

I’m not convinced that your shell example and the error message match exactly: the error says ${DIR} but sh would have expanded that to either the value, or the empty string.

The problem is most likely that you’re using single quotes when you shouldn't. These disable expansion:

$ FOO=42
$ echo $FOO
42
$ echo "$FOO"
42
$ echo '$FOO'
$FOO

Also note that because bitbake’s parse and then sh’s parse can both use ${FOO} for variable expansion, it’s convention to use ${FOO} for *bitbake* variables and then just $FOO for sh variables, as bitbake only expands ${FOO} but sh will expand both ${FOO} and $FOO. If you do ${FOO} and bitbake doesn’t know the variable, it doesn’t get replaced with the empty string (contrary to sh behaviour) so that sh can have a go.

Ross