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