Question

I have some bash scripts that I would like to run in OSX, but some of them contain the fallthrough case terminator ‘;&’ which doesn’t seem to work on Mac. Here’s sample code:

#!/bin/bash
case $1 in
    test)
        echo "go" ;&    
    test)
        echo "go2" ;;
esac

In Cygwin, .\test.sh test produces

go
go2

but on OSX,

./test.sh: line 4: syntax error near unexpected token `&'
./test.sh: line 4: `            echo "go" ;&   

Answer 1

Your code works as is on my ubuntu system, bash 4.2.24.

I think you are using an earlier version of bash which doesn’t support ;& fall-through which was added since bash 4.

From wikipedia:

Fall through is done using ;& (new since Bash 4) whereas ;; acts as a case break.