Monkey-patching bash functions

Disclaimer: the whole post is a big bad hack.

Suppose that there is a big regularly-updated library of bash functions, and your script sources it or is sourced by it. One of these functions is not exactly right for your purpose (e.g. it contains a bug or misses a feature), but fixing the bug or adding the feature there is not practical. This might happen if the file containing the function library is managed by a package manager, and your bugfix will be overwritten at the next package update.

A straightforward sledgehammer-like solution is to make a copy of the library, fix the bug there, and source or be sourced by your modified copy (thus losing all future updates). This is not good.

If the offending function is called by your script directly, then, of course, you can define a differently-named function that is otherwise-identical to the original one, but has the needed fix, directly in your script, and use it. However, this approach does not work (or, rather, requires you to duplicate the whole call chain) if your script calls the offending function only indirectly.

A possibly-better solution (that may or may not work) is to redefine the offending function in your script. Indeed, out of many possibly existing definitions for a function bash uses the last one it encountered. Here is an interactive example of such overloading:

$ barf() { echo "123" ; }
$ barf
123
$ barf() { echo "456" ; }
$ barf
456

So, now you know how to completely replace a function. But, what if only a small change is required? E.g., if one command is missing at the end? This is also solvable thanks to an introspection feature of bash. I am talking about the "type" builtin. Here is what it does when applied to a function:

$ type barf
barf is a function
barf ()
{
    echo "456"
}

So, you have one line of a meaningless header and then the full slightly-reformatted source of the function on standard output. Let's grab this into a variable:

$ def=$( type barf )

You can then post-process it. E.g., let's transform this into a definition of a function that does exactly the same but also prints "789" at the end. The easiest way to do that is to remove the first line (the header) and insert echo "789" before the last line. Uhm, it is not easy to remove a line from a variable in pure bash... no problem, we'll comment it out instead!

$ def="# $( type barf )"
$ echo "$def"
# barf is a function
barf ()
{
    echo "456"
}

And now remove the last character (a closing brace) and replace it with the correct code:

$ def="${def%\}}echo \"789\" ; }"
$ echo "$def"
# barf is a function
barf ()
{
    echo "456"
echo "789" ; }

All that remains is to feed the contents of this variable back to bash as a piece of code. That's what eval does:

$ eval "$def"

Now the function looks correct and does what is intended:

$ type barf
barf is a function
barf ()
{
    echo "456";
    echo "789"
}
$ barf
456
789