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Questions tagged [arguments]

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An argument is usually defined as the actual value passed to a function, procedure, or command line program.

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Consider the following code: foo () { echo $* } bar () { echo $@ } foo 1 2 3 4 bar 1 2 3 4 It outputs: 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 I am using Ksh88, but I am interested in other common shells ...
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I was under the impression that the maximum length of a single argument was not the problem here so much as the total size of the overall argument array plus the size of the environment, which is ...
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I've a command that outputs data to stdout (command1 -p=aaa -v=bbb -i=4). The output line can have the following value: rate (10%) - name: value - 10Kbps I want to grep that output in order to store ...
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Consider that there are countless number of files under /src/ cp /src/* /dst/ How many files cp will successfully process?
Mike's user avatar
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8 answers
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I am wondering whether there is a general way of passing multiple options to an executable via the shebang line (#!). I use NixOS, and the first part of the shebang in any script I write is usually /...
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10 answers
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I have a folder with more than a million files that needs sorting, but I can't really do anything because mv outputs this message all the time -bash: /bin/mv: Argument list too long I'm using this ...
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15 votes
3 answers
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I need to indirectly reference a variable in the bash shell. I basically want to what you can do in make by writing $($(var)). I have tried using ${$var} which would be the most straight forward ...
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89 votes
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I get the following error when trying to ls *.txt | wc -l a directory that contains many files: -bash: /bin/ls: Argument list too long Does the threshold of this "Argument list" dependent on distro ...
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75 votes
3 answers
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I noticed some time ago that usernames and passwords given to curl as command line arguments don't appear in ps output (although of course they may appear in your bash history). They likewise don't ...
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46 votes
7 answers
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cd - can switch between current dir and previous dir. It seems that I have seen - used as arguments to other commands before, though I don't remember if - means the same as with cd. I found that - ...
Tim's user avatar
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33 votes
2 answers
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I could use the either form to execute the cat method: cat file_name cat < file_name The result is the same Then I want to execute man in the format of stdin man < file_name While file_name ...
steveyang's user avatar
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27 votes
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I wonder when we should use pipeline and when we shouldn't. Say for instance, to kill certain process which handling pdf files, the following will not work by using pipeline: ps aux | grep pdf | awk '{...
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I would like to write a bash script with unknown amount of arguments. How can I walk through these arguments and do something with them? A wrong attempt would look like this: #!/bin/bash for i in $...
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In the manual for the ps command on Ubuntu there is this text: This version of ps accepts several kinds of options: 1 UNIX options, which may be grouped and must be preceded by a dash. ...
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9 votes
1 answer
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I suddenly realized I don't know how to execute things over SSH. I tried to do $ ssh user@server sh -c 'echo "hello"' but it outputs nothing, or rather, it outputs an empty line. If the command ...
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