A Practical Guide to Red Hat® Linux® 8

Command Line Expansion

Before passing the command line to the program being called, the shell transforms the command line by using command line expansion. The shell also expands each line of a shell script as the shell executes the script. You can use any of the shells without knowing much about command line expansion, but you can make much better use of what they have to offer with an understanding of this topic.

Chapter 5 discussed one aspect of command line expansion in “Filename Generation/Pathname Expansion” on page 157. TC Shell command line expansion is covered starting on page 693, and Z Shell coverage of this topic begins on page 797. The following sections review several types of command line expansion you may be familiar with and introduce ...