On Fri, May 08, 1998 at 01:07:44PM -0400, Thomas J. Malloy wrote: > When I, an linux and unix novice, find that commands I am entering are not > yielding the results I expect how do I know if this failure is caused by a > program bug, an error in the book or man page, my error or something else? > For example on page 104 of "Learning the Bash Shell" O'reilly there is the > following command > vi $(grep -l 'command substitution' ch*) > > According to the text should load into the vi editor a file that is a list > of the files in the PWD that begin with "ch" which contain the string > "command substition". The man page for grep would seem to confirm this > However when I typed > vi $(grep -l 'linux' *.txt) > it loaded all the documents into vi not a list of documents. Is the book > wrong?
The book is wrong. Debian's behavior is correct. You'd have to save the list of files _to_ a file before vi would be able to read it as a list: grep -l linux *.txt > tmpfile vi tmpfile Instead, what you're doing is feeding the output of the grep command to the command line. Try this for clarification: echo $(grep -l linux *.txt) Or this: echo `grep -l linux *.txt` > And as long as I am here, I have noticed that the escape charactor in > kermit does not work ^\. Neither does there seem to be anyway to exit > dosemu other than killing the process. Kermit is full of bugs, and hamm does not have a current version. You can exit dosemu by running the "exitemu" program. Jeff -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
