What Does "$#" Mean in Bash

What does $@ mean in a shell script?

$@ is nearly the same as $*, both meaning "all command line arguments". They are often used to simply pass all arguments to another program (thus forming a wrapper around that other program).

The difference between the two syntaxes shows up when you have an argument with spaces in it (e.g.) and put $@ in double quotes:

wrappedProgram "$@"
# ^^^ this is correct and will hand over all arguments in the way
#     we received them, i. e. as several arguments, each of them
#     containing all the spaces and other uglinesses they have.
wrappedProgram "$*"
# ^^^ this will hand over exactly one argument, containing all
#     original arguments, separated by single spaces.
wrappedProgram $*
# ^^^ this will join all arguments by single spaces as well and
#     will then split the string as the shell does on the command
#     line, thus it will split an argument containing spaces into
#     several arguments.

Example: Calling

wrapper "one two    three" four five "six seven"

will result in:

"$@": wrappedProgram "one two    three" four five "six seven"
"$*": wrappedProgram "one two    three four five six seven"
                             ^^^^ These spaces are part of the first
                                  argument and are not changed.
$*:   wrappedProgram one two three four five six seven

Difference between ${} and $() in Bash

The syntax is token-level, so the meaning of the dollar sign depends on the token it's in. The expression $(command) is a modern synonym for `command` which stands for command substitution; it means run command and put its output here. So

echo "Today is $(date). A fine day."

will run the date command and include its output in the argument to echo. The parentheses are unrelated to the syntax for running a command in a subshell, although they have something in common (the command substitution also runs in a separate subshell).

By contrast, ${variable} is just a disambiguation mechanism, so you can say ${var}text when you mean the contents of the variable var, followed by text (as opposed to $vartext which means the contents of the variable vartext).

The while loop expects a single argument which should evaluate to true or false (or actually multiple, where the last one's truth value is examined -- thanks Jonathan Leffler for pointing this out); when it's false, the loop is no longer executed. The for loop iterates over a list of items and binds each to a loop variable in turn; the syntax you refer to is one (rather generalized) way to express a loop over a range of arithmetic values.

A for loop like that can be rephrased as a while loop. The expression

for ((init; check; step)); do
    body
done

is equivalent to

init
while check; do
    body
    step
done

It makes sense to keep all the loop control in one place for legibility; but as you can see when it's expressed like this, the for loop does quite a bit more than the while loop.

Of course, this syntax is Bash-specific; classic Bourne shell only has

for variable in token1 token2 ...; do

(Somewhat more elegantly, you could avoid the echo in the first example as long as you are sure that your argument string doesn't contain any % format codes:

date +'Today is %c. A fine day.'

Avoiding a process where you can is an important consideration, even though it doesn't make a lot of difference in this isolated example.)

Meaning of $? (dollar question mark) in shell scripts

This is the exit status of the last executed command.

For example the command true always returns a status of 0 and false always returns a status of 1:

true
echo $? # echoes 0
false
echo $? # echoes 1

From the manual: (acessible by calling man bash in your shell)

? Expands to the exit status of the most recently executed foreground pipeline.

By convention an exit status of 0 means success, and non-zero return status means failure. Learn more about exit statuses on wikipedia.

There are other special variables like this, as you can see on this online manual: https://www.gnu.org/s/bash/manual/bash.html#Special-Parameters

what does '$?' mean in a shell script?

$?

returns the status of the last finished command.
Status 0 tells you that everything finished ok.

In addition the $ sign is a special symbol - and in that case $val extract the value that is hold by the variable val

What does it mean in shell when we put a command inside dollar sign and parentheses: $(command)

Usage of the $ like ${HOME} gives the value of HOME. Usage of the $ like $(echo foo) means run whatever is inside the parentheses in a subshell and return that as the value. In my example, you would get foo since echo will write foo to standard out

What does the $ mean in Linux?

For this particular case following code means:

Somebody with user name "user" has logged in to the machine with host name "Linux-003".

"~" - represent the home folder of the user, conventionally it would be /home/user/, where "user" is the user name can be anything like /home/johnsmith.

"$" - is just a sign of the shell prompt, means that shell is ready to accept commands, you can understand it as a separator after which, you can interact with a shell.
Can also be "#" which shows that root is the user who's session is going on.

what means $ (ampersand) in a command?

In Bash the '$' sign means that a normal user logged into the system can execute a command. If you're logged in as the root user, the prompt is '#' (hash or number symbol).

For further reading about the use and history of the prompt, please have a look at https://superuser.com/questions/57575/what-is-the-origin-of-the-unix-dollar-prompt