Thanks for the links i will check it out! Also i wasn't aware of the
-F function, playing with it now and that is a big help with working
around the whole color bit. Clearly the / is for directories. How are
the rest used? Surprisingly even google doesn't know. From what i
could see they didn't label links and such so not very helpful in that
respect but at least i wont try to vi a directory or cd to a file.
On Mon, Oct 3, 2016 at 7:43 PM, Evan Gates <evan.ga...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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 Please do not read that, it's full of practices that are outdated and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
>
