Echo command, and then run it? (Like make)

Question

Is there some way to get bash into a sort of verbose mode where, such that, when it's running a shell script, it echoes out the command it's going to run before running it? That is, so that it's possible to see the commands that were run (as well as their output), similar to the output of make?

That is, if running a shell script like

echo "Hello, World"

I would like the following output

echo "Hello, World"
Hello, World

Alternatively, is it possible to write a bash function called echo_and_run that will output a command and then run it?

$ echo_and_run echo "Hello, World"
echo "Hello, World"
Hello, World

Answer 1

You could make your own function to echo commands before calling eval.

Bash also has a debugging feature. Once you set -x bash will display each command before executing it.

cnicutar@shell:~/dir$ set -x
cnicutar@shell:~/dir$ ls
+ ls --color=auto
a  b  c  d  e  f

Answer 2

To answer the second part of your question, here's a shell function that does what you want:

echo_and_run() { echo "$*" ; "$@" ; }

I use something similar to this:

echo_and_run() { echo "\$ $*" ; "$@" ; }

which prints $ in front of the command (it looks like a shell prompt and makes it clearer that it's a command). I sometimes use this in scripts when I want to show some (but not all) of the commands it's executing.

As others have mentioned, it does lose quotation marks:

$ echo_and_run echo "Hello, world"
$ echo Hello, world
Hello, world
$ 

but I don't think there's any good way to avoid that; the shell strips quotation marks before echo_and_run gets a chance to see them. You could write a script that would check for arguments containing spaces and other shell metacharacters and add quotation marks as needed (which still wouldn't necessarily match the quotation marks you actually typed).