Some friendly shell-scripting hints! — Quoted strings continue until the close quote, regardless of intervening newlines, tabs or spaces. Your REPOS definition

Some friendly shell-scripting hints! — Quoted strings continue until the close quote, regardless of intervening newlines, tabs or spaces. Your REPOS definition would be more readable without the backslashes and work just as well: REPOS=" $HOME/git/repo1 $HOME/git/repo2 $HOME/git/repo3 " — pushd and popd are handy, but are bash extensions and not part of POSIX /bin/sh (and yes, a lot of systems including Ubuntu and Debian have a bare POSIX /bin/sh). Even when they are available, shell error handling can make it difficult to be sure that each pushd has a matching popd. A simpler approach is to just cd in the subshell: sh -c "cd $REPO; $1" — Rather than explicitly invoking the shell you might find it easier to do the same thing with syntax: ( cd $REPO eval "$1" ) ...or, you might find that even less readable. Up to you!