Table of Contents

Overflow

It will depend on your version of bash, your OS1) and your CPU2) architecture. To try it, we will set a variable to (2^16). If the output is the right answer, we will set it to (2^32), and so on untill the answer is not right anymore.

In the example below, we can see that at (2^64) the answer is not right anymore. So we substract 1 at the result (2^64) - 1 to know if it is a non-signed INT and we see that the answer is not right yet. So we substract 1 to the exponent (2^63) to know if it is a signed INT and … the answer still wrong.

Then we substract 1 at the result (2^63) - 1 and we see that the result is the answer we were waiting for. We can therefore deduce that it is a signed 64 bit INT. To prove it, we add 1 to the variable and we can see the MIN limit signed INT.

We have now the MIN and the MAX limit.

Example

#!/bin/bash

((X=2**16)); echo $X
((X=2**32)); echo $X
((X=2**64)); echo $X 		#Overflow
((X=(2**64)-1)); echo $X 	#Overflow
((X=2**63)); echo $X 		#Overflow
((X=(2**63)-1)); echo $X 	#Limit MAX signed int
((X++)); echo $X 		#Overflow - Limit MIN signed int

X=9223372036854775807; echo $X 	#String or Int, we will never now
((X=($X*1))); echo $X 		#Int
((X=($X*2))); echo $X 		#Int overflow
((X++)); echo $X 		#Int overflow

X=9223372036854775908; echo $X 	#String
((X++)); echo $X 		#INT overflow

Output will be :

65536
4294967296
0                             #Overflow
-1                            #Overflow
-9223372036854775808          #Overflow
9223372036854775807           #Limit MAX signed int
-9223372036854775808          #Overflow - Limit MIN signed int

9223372036854775807           #String or Int, we will never now
9223372036854775807           #Int
-2                            #Int overflow
-1

9223372036854775908           #String
-9223372036854775707          #INT overflow

Interesting fact :

At the end, we set a variable bigger than the MAX limit and increment X (in this case X=1). The variable is at first stocked as a STR but when we force it to increment by X, we see that bash will compensate and output the MIN limit incremented by X.
1)
Operating System
2)
Processor