Question

In Bash, how do I declare a local integer variable, i.e. something like:

func() {
  local ((number = 0)) # I know this does not work
  local declare -i number=0 # this doesn't work either

  # other statements, possibly modifying number
}

Somewhere I saw local -i number=0 being used, but this doesn’t look very portable.

Answer 1

Per http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html#Bash-Builtins,

local [option] name[=value] ...

For each argument, a local variable named name is created, and assigned value. The option can be any of the options accepted by declare.

So local -i is valid.