Re: What does the "`" Characteter Do?

[Mike Stroyan]

On Mon, Oct 08, 2007 at 01:59:25PM -0600, Bob Proulx wrote:
> duff wrote:
> > What does this "`" character do in the command line?
> 
> Command Substitution.  And I was a little surprised to see that when I
> looked for that character in the man page that it did not appear
> anywhere within it in the Debian formatting of the manual.  It appears
> that there is a formatting issue surrounding the output of that
> character and this may have prevented you from finding that character
> by a search of the documentation.

  The ` character does format correctly on debian for some locales.
I get good output with 
  LANG=C man bash

  The problem comes from formatting of ` to an abstract 'left quote'
value.  That can be avoided by quoting it in the manual source as \`.
That is an understandable error.  Even "man groff" gets that wrong.

-- 
Mike Stroyan <mike@stroyan.net>