Re: Making $! and $? searchable in the man page

[Clark J. Wang]

On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 1:33 AM, Greg Wooledge <wooledg@eeg.ccf.org> wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 06, 2011 at 10:48:33AM +0100, Vidar Holen wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Finding the meaning of $? and $! in the man page is quite hard for people
> > not familiar with the layout and bash terminology (this frequently comes
> > up in Freenode #bash). It would be very helpful for them if you could
> > simply search for "$!" to find the description of the parameter !.
>
> I absolutely second this.  In fact, I sent a very similar patch for this
> last year.
>
>
Agree. Also for this:

       ${parameter}
              The  value of parameter is substituted.  The braces are
required
              when parameter is a positional  parameter  with  more  than
one
              digit, or when parameter is followed by a character which is
not
              to be interpreted as part of its name.

       If the first character of parameter is an exclamation point, a level
of
       variable  indirection  is introduced.

I recommend to add another line just after ${parameter}:

       ${parameter}
       ${!parameter}

-- 
Clark