John Luke Gibson eaterjolly@gmail.com writes:
On 5/9/17, Benson Mitchell benson.mitchell+arm-netbook@gmail.com wrote:
Seems like you're confusing back-quote (`) with single-quote ('), maybe?
I just want to say that alone makes for pretty terrible design within a fundamental language which an entire os can't run without.
When `` was first used I'm sure they were very pleased to have come up with command substitution at all, so blaming them for introducing readability issues is a bit harsh. It's also possible that the distinction between ` and ' was much more obvious when one was reading the code off of a punched paper tape ;-)
$() has been in POSIX for at least 13 years:
http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/xcu_chap02.html#tag...
but I suspect that it was in 1003.2 in 1997, but cannot find a reference.
It is certainly a shame when one sees new scripts being written with ``, but that's what one gets when people are learning by example, and there is too little curation of the examples to weed out the archaic usage.
Cheers, Phil.