On Sat, May 15, 2004 at 06:31:18AM -0400, richard lyons wrote: > BTW, why "grep '^ii.*'". WHat does the ".*" usefully add?
Nothing. > and the single quotes? I expected, and got, the same response with > either or both omitted. '*' is a metacharacter to the shell: if you'd happened to have any files in the current directory whose names started with '^ii.' for whatever reason, or if you had the shell option 'nullglob' set, then "grep ^ii.*" would have gone wrong. You may feel this is unlikely, but it's good style to quote metacharacters nonetheless. There are no metacharacters in ^ii alone, so quoting there is unnecessary. -- Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
