Where to read about "special characters" under Linux?
I have learned that so many characters have special functions ($,$$...) or even replace commands ([ for test...) under Linux. I want to learn more about those characters, where can I read more about that? Any text pointer or a simple list were what I desire. Regards, love you reading here! Olli -- *º¤., ¸¸,.¤º*¨¨¨*¤ =Oliver@home= *º¤., ¸¸,.¤º*¨¨*¤ I http://www.bmw-roadster.de/Friends/Olli/olli.html I I http://www.bmw-roadster.de/Friends/friends.html I I http://groups.yahoo.com/group/VGAP-93 I I http://home.t-online.de/home/spacecraft.portal I
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On Wed, Sep 12, 2001 at 12:13:15PM +0200, Lx wrote:
I have learned that so many characters have special functions ($,$$...) or even replace commands ([ for test...) under Linux. I want to learn more about those characters, where can I read more about that? Any text pointer or a simple list were what I desire.
These characters are not necessarily the same for all shells, although there are similarities. Since the default shell on SuSE is bash, you're probably best looking at: man bash Bash-Prompt-HOWTO Bash-Prog-Intro-HOWTO Those are probably your best bets. Have fun, Chris -- http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html __ _ -o)/ / (_)__ __ ____ __ Chris Reeves /\\ /__/ / _ \/ // /\ \/ / ICQ# 22219005 _\_v __/_/_//_/\_,_/ /_/\_\
I have learned that so many characters have special functions ($,$$...) or even replace commands ([ for test...) under Linux. I want to learn more about those characters, where can I read more about that? Any text pointer or a simple list were what I desire.
Regards, love you reading here! Olli There are two things you need to look into: The shells (bash/sh/tcsh etc) use certain metacharacters for special
On Wed, Sep 12, 2001 at 12:13:15PM +0200, Lx wrote: purposes. these you will find documented in the shell manual pages, or in any good Unix book. [ .. ] is an alternate for "test", which you use is a matter of taste Look at the man page for test. (Calling a system program "test" must have been the worse deign decision in the history of UNIX .. lol). For example: FOO=BALONY if test $FOO = BALONY then echo BINGO fi if [ $FOO = BALONY ] then echo BINGO fi [ $FOO = BALONY ] && { echo BINGO; } are 3 ways of doing the same thing. Now many programs use so-called regular expressions which reserve certain characters for special purposes. Unfortunately many of the programs have variant behaviour in this regard. You need to have a look at the documentation for grep,egrep,sed etc to get a handle on this. Again any good Unix book will cover this. Don;t confuse shell metacharacter usage with program RE's. And then there are regular expressions in the language "perl" ... but that is another story... -- Regards Cliff Sending an email as follows will get you my public gpg key... To: cliff@raggedclown.net Subject: send public key
On Wed, Sep 12, 2001 at 12:13:15PM +0200, Lx wrote:
Regards, love you reading here! Olli
As I wrote: Love you reading here! Thanks Cliff and Chris, you brought me on! On the german list some would have simply responded "RTFM", but now I know that these chars are shell dependant. Thanks folks, I will be reading bash info tonight... -- *º¤., ¸¸,.¤º*¨¨¨*¤ =Oliver@home= *º¤., ¸¸,.¤º*¨¨*¤ I http://www.bmw-roadster.de/Friends/Olli/olli.html I I http://www.bmw-roadster.de/Friends/friends.html I I http://groups.yahoo.com/group/VGAP-93 I I http://home.t-online.de/home/spacecraft.portal I
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participants (4)
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Chris Reeves
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Cliff Sarginson
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Lx
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Oliver Ob