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. > 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@xxxxxxxxx > >
