On Sunday, 17 September 2017 11:52:00 BST Ralph Corderoy wrote: > BTW, this is all fairly basic shell scripting stuff, e.g. quoting with > "" or '' or ``, with a little knowledge of how Unix works. I know you > think you don't need to know it, and can stick with Python, or the > electronics, but you're clearly having a tough time of it learning > piecemeal from a hotchpotch of problems rather than a planned gentle > introduction.
Well that's me told :-) > I learnt from two of Unix's creators, Kernighan and Pike's _The Unix > Programming Environment_, http://amzn.to/16SVwhD and it's what I still > recommend, though the price seems to have kept pace with inflation over > the decades. There are second-hand ones available though. That's the nicest RTFM I've ever had :-) The problem I have is that I was never (and never will be) a software developer. I have written snippets of code in various languages on both Unix and Windows platforms for well over 30 years, but I have never sat down to intensively write code; it has always been a means to make the electronics work. Taking the quoting of the strings in 'echo', every language and platform that I have ever used has had a different policy on strings (single quotes, double quotes, brackets and combinations thereof). I only mentioned the quoting problem because I had done what I usually did for strings and then only realised it was wrong when I read your response (at a time when I would be unable to test it for a few days). With 'exec' the story was different because I had never noticed this command before. I read the man page when Bob mentioned it and as usual learnt little because of the terminology used. I then looked around and stumbled across a page that made some kind of sense. It was only when you said that my definition was wrong that I went back and realised that I had found a definition of exec(), not exec. I do read books and online material to find out what I need to do, but since I never trained as a software engineer, I frequently end up more confused than when I started; hence my Janet and John queries on this list. Coupled with the fact that I literally only do this sort of thing a few times a year (when the hardware needs a platform to operate on), I suspect that I'd forget what I learned by the time I needed it. Anyway. I'm still grateful for any help given and I'll try not to be so dumb in the future ;-( -- Terry Coles -- Next meeting: Bournemouth, Tuesday, 2017-10-03 20:00 Meets, Mailing list, IRC, LinkedIn, ... http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ New thread: mailto:dorset@mailman.lug.org.uk / CHECK IF YOU'RE REPLYING Reporting bugs well: http://goo.gl/4Xue / TO THE LIST OR THE AUTHOR
