After reading the Bash man pages and with respect to this post, I am still having trouble understanding what exactly the eval command does and which would be its typical uses. For …

eval is a bash-builtin and is documented in the man page of bash. So just type "man bash" and search for the appropriate section for eval. This applies for other bash-builtins, too.

Eval function try to execute and interpret the string (argument) passed to it as python code. x=1 print (eval ('x+1')) Output of the above code will be 2. The disadvantage of such approach is …

I was reading a bash script someone made and I noticed that the author doesn't use eval to evaluate a variable as a command The author used bash -c "$1" instead of eval "$1" I assume …

eval makes it possible to execute (or evaluate) a string of javascript code. Thus, it is applicable when you want someone to execute a string of javascript code.

Your example provides the same result, but the purpose of eval and source is different. source is usually used for providing a library for other scripts, while eval is used only to evaluate …

But they are rare. Using eval in your case is a bad practice for sure. I'm emphasizing on bad practice because eval and exec are frequently used in the wrong place. Replying to the …

335 Your shell is meant to evaluate that shell code output by ssh-agent. Run this instead: eval "$(ssh-agent)" Or if you've started ssh-agent already, copy paste it to your shell prompt …

The eval function is a powerful and easy way to dynamically generate code, so what are the caveats?

You need eval if the replacement string contains a shell special symbol, like ;, &, |, $, and you want it to have its special meaning instead of using it literally. Succeeding without eval …