--- Jeff Vian jvian10@charter.net wrote:
On Fri, 2005-12-30 at 10:29 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
On Fri, 2005-12-30 at 05:21, Gene Heskett wrote:
Often the man pages have examples of the way
the author expected
the program to be used. However, there's still
a good chance
that isn't exactly what you want to do with it.
I submit to you all the manpages for bash.
Paragraph after paragraph of explanation of this
option and that option
in a quite verbose manner, and not a single
actual example of a
command line, and the results it should return.
Bash is kind of unusual because it is normally the
'calling'
program, not the one being executed on a command
line - or if
you do execute it intentionally as a command the
purpose is
to start some other program in a subshell. What
you need Not entirely true. Many of us use shell scripts to do a significant amount of work that would otherwise be tedious and repetitive.
Very true! Shell scripts save time and run very efficiently. There are many examples of these, using lame to convert wav's to mp3's/ogg's among others.
to know about bash is what it does to your command
lines
(splitting on IFS, expanding variables and
wildcard filenames,
redirection i/o etc.) before starting any other
program.
What those other programs do or return is their
own business
but they probably are the real reason you are
issuing a
shell command.
Sure, you need to know *how* to use it and the programming features that often function in the background. Bash is a genuine programming environment, as well as a command interpreter.
What most people see is the ability to call other programs. What is actually there is *much* more and extremely versatile.
That makes writing even a 10 line bash script into an extended
reading and re-reading
session with heavy use of the manpages builtin
grep because its so
poorly organized that the complete answer may be
in 3 or more places
scattered through it.
That 10 line bash script might execute 20
different external
commands, none of which the bash author
anticipated. That's
why the system is powerful - whenever anyone adds
a new tool
you are able to combine it's operations with all
the others
but it also makes it impossible to document all
the possibilities.
-- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@gmail.com
-- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
This list is amazing. There are many great individuals that go out of their way to help users in need. I would like to thank all the users but that is very hard to do. Many people have very interesting points to make. But to say that people are not helpful is not a good one. If one does not know the answer to a certain question, we continue on, why give out information that will not help the users out. Someone that has been there generally comes through and helps out.
Best Regards,
Antonio
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