Skip to Content
Macintosh Terminal Pocket Guide
book

Macintosh Terminal Pocket Guide

by Daniel J. Barrett
June 2012
Beginner
227 pages
5h 43m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Macintosh Terminal Pocket Guide

Whitespace and Linebreaks

bash shell scripts are sensitive to whitespace and linebreaks. Because the “keywords” of this programming language are actually commands evaluated by the shell, you need to separate arguments with whitespace. Likewise, a linebreak in the middle of a command will mislead the shell into thinking the command is incomplete. Follow the conventions we present here and you should be fine.

If you must break a long command into multiple lines, end each line (except the last) with a single \ character, which means “continued on next line”:

grep abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz file1 file2 \
  file3 file4

The slash must be the final character on its line: that is, you must press Enter immediately after it. Finally, any text following a hash mark (#) on a line is a comment.

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Learning Unix for OS X, 2nd Edition

Learning Unix for OS X, 2nd Edition

Dave Taylor
Mac OS X in a Nutshell

Mac OS X in a Nutshell

Jason McIntosh, Chuck Toporek, Chris Stone

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781449328962Errata Page