On Mon, Oct 3, 2016 at 4:34 PM, stephen Turner
<stephen.n.tur...@gmail.com> wrote:
> @Evan
> I am not too fluent at advanced shell at the moment so help me out
> with this one please, I checked the advanced scripting guide but want
> to make sure i understand this.
Please do not read that, it's full of practices that are outdated and
in many cases it is plane wrong. Instead check out the bash guide[0]
and the accompanying bash faq[1] and bash pitfalls[2]. Although the
wiki is bash specific it also covers POSIX sh very well.
> s() { ls -F "$@" | cols; }
> s() implies that you have created an alias for ls as "s" and the () is
> to listen for what follows for the flags "-h etc"?
It's a function definition.
> {} is to encapsulate the real commands,
The body of a function is a compound command, meaning it's one of:
a list in braces
a list in parens
a loop (for, while until)
an if statement (with following elif, else)
a case statement
That said most often you'll see braces.
> ls -F "$@" the "$@" is to pass along the flags from s()?
"$@" expands to the positional parameters (arguments) and must be
quoted otherwise you can run into further word splitting and glob
expansion (this is true for all expansions/substitutions).
> and for the ; at the end of cols, i assume this terminates in a way
> that prevents it from grabbing further input?
A terminator is needed before the closing brace, both newline and
semicolon are accepted.
[0] http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashGuide
[1] http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ
[2] http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashPitfalls
