March 2002
Beginner
504 pages
10h 47m
English
Content preview from Sams Teach Yourself Shell Programming in 24 Hours, Second Edition
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Quoting with Backslashes
To start out, let's use echo to get a better idea about how the shell treats special characters. For example,
$ echo Hello world
displays the following message on your screen:
Hello world
Watch what happens if you add the semicolon (;) meta-character in between Hello and world:
$ echo Hello; world Hello sh: world: Command not found
The semicolon (;) character tells the shell that it has reached the end of one command and what follows is a new command. This character enables multiple commands on one line. Because world is not a valid command, you get an error message (the error message on your system might be slightly different).
In order to display a meta-character, you need to quote it. When a character is quoted, ...
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