UNIX° TEXT PROCESSING

Shell Command Summary

This section describes the syntax of the Bourne Shell. It lists special characters, variables, and built-in programming commands used by the shell.

Special Files

$ HOME/.profile      Executed at shell startup.

Special Characters for Filename Generation

*	Match any string of characters.
?	Match any single character.
[ . . . ]	Match any of the enclosed characters. A pair of characters separated by a minus will match any character lexically between the pair.

Special Characters for Control Flow

|	Perform pipeline (use output of preceding command as input of following command, e.g., cat file | lpr).
;	Separate sequential commands on the same line.
&	Run command in background (e.g., lpr file&).
&&	Execute command if previous command was successful (e.g., grep string file && lpr file).
||	Execute command if previous command was unsuccessful (e.g., grep string 1 file | | grep string2 file).
( )	Execute commands enclosed in ( ) in a subshell; output from the entire set can then be redirected as a unit or placed in the background.
'...'	Take all characters between single quotation marks literally. (Don’t allow special character meaning.)
\	Take following character literally.
". .. "	Take enclosed characters literally but allow variable and command substitution.
'cmd'	Use output of cmd as argument to another command.
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