Re: echo x > a > b > c > d

[Eduardo Bustamante]

On Sun, Apr 16, 2017 at 7:40 PM, 積丹尼 Dan Jacobson <jidanni@jidanni.org> wrote:
> OK sorry. I guess they make a lot of sense.

These constructs are valid grammatically, and have a well defined
semantic meaning. See:

dualbus@debian:~$ strace -e open bash -c ': <a <b <c <d' 2>&1|tail -n5
open("a", O_RDONLY)                     = 3
open("b", O_RDONLY)                     = 3
open("c", O_RDONLY)                     = 3
open("d", O_RDONLY)                     = 3
+++ exited with 0 +++

dualbus@debian:~$ strace -e open bash -c ': >a >b >c >d' 2>&1|tail -n5
open("a", O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC, 0666) = 3
open("b", O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC, 0666) = 3
open("c", O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC, 0666) = 3
open("d", O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC, 0666) = 3
+++ exited with 0 +++

Yes, it might be an awkward thing to write in a script, but it's still
valid. If you want recommendations on bad shell scripting practices,
perhaps you might want to try shellcheck instead?