Why update Swahili?

Timothy Murphy gayleard at eircom.net
Wed Sep 23 11:06:11 UTC 2009


gilpel at altern.org wrote:

>>>> If you don't need them, just say
>>>> yum erase m17n\*
>>>
>>> Yeah, I suppose with yum they wouldn't come back. But what is the
>>> backslash for? Can't find any backslash in the yum man page.
>>
>> The backslash is to prevent the shell from expanding the asterisk and
>> passing on the asterisk to yum literally. Its called escaping a special
>> character. Try looking for escaping characters in the bash man page.
> 
> So, if I write
> 
> rm m17n*
> 
> it will remove all instances of m17n...
> 
> but, because yum is not a bash command, the * has to be escaped?

I may be wrong - if so, I hope I will be corrected -
but I don't think you _have_ to escape the *.

It is just that if you don't do that,
and there happens to be a file m17n... in the current directory
it will assume you mean that.
If there is no such file "yum ... m17n*" will work fine.

-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland




More information about the users mailing list