7SEEING THE WORLD AS THE SHELL SEES IT
In this chapter, we are going to look at some of the “magic” that occurs on the command line when we press the ENTER key. While we will examine several interesting and complex features of the shell, we will do it with just one new command:
echo Display a line of text
Expansion
Each time we type a command and press the ENTER key, bash performs several substitutions upon the text before it carries out our command. We have seen a couple of cases of how a simple character sequence, for example *, can have a lot of meaning to the shell. The process that makes this happen is called expansion. With expansion, we ...
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