February 2004
Beginner
200 pages
5h 40m
English
Similar to wildcards, expressions with curly braces also expand to become multiple arguments to a command. The comma-separated expression:
{a,b,cc,ddd}expands to:
a b cc dddd
Braces work with any strings, unlike wildcards which are limited to filenames. For example, sand{X,Y,ZZZ}wichexpands to:
$ echo sand{X,Y,ZZZ}wich
sandXwich sandYwich sandZZZwichregardless of what files are in the current directory.