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Re: while loops can not read "\"
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From: |
Chet Ramey |
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Subject: |
Re: while loops can not read "\" |
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Date: |
Wed, 23 Dec 2020 09:44:46 -0500 |
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User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/78.5.1 |
On 12/22/20 9:13 AM, Ilkka Virta wrote:
Arguably it's a bug that 'help read' doesn't mention the effect of
backslashes, other than what can be extrapolated from the description of
-r. It only says "The line is split into fields _as with word splitting_",
but word splitting doesn't recognize backslashes as special. It should not
be necessary to read the description of all options to infer the behaviour
of a command as used without them.
That isn't the function of `help'. The help documentation is intended to be
a quick reference, not to duplicate everything in the man page.
--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU chet@case.edu http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/