On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 20:08, Michael Rasmussen <[email protected]> wrote: > ash continues to amaze me. I saw &( ... ) in use once and had to > call my unix geek friends to find out how that could possibly work. > ~ Ward Cunningham > > Never mind how it works, what does it do? > > Can't Google for punctuation, not in the Bash references I searched, the > thread about web searching for punctuation > isn't findable via search engine. > > So it's up to Plug and its repository of knowledge.
geez, i really wanted to be the one to answer this. I've never used the ampersand that way, and i though maybe (due to your quote) that it was ash-specific, but no dice (thought the ash man page may be my new sweetheart, it's less than 1/3 the length of bash(1) and is extremely concise everywhere & is mentioned at least =)) but the best answer i found was from wikipedia, which merely expounded upon the possibilities while maddeningly not expanding: " In Bash, the ampersand can separate words, control the command history, duplicate file descriptors, perform logical operations, control jobs, and participate in Regular expressions. " (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampersand) _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
