Re: FW: Help! ipmasqadm problem - Help its still not working

[eichin@thok.org (Mark W. Eichin)]

> If unquoted, most shells will search for a file with that name before
> giving up and using the parameter as a string.

You're probably being confused by glob-failure behaviour, which has
nothing to do with this case (in this case, "cat isn't echo", and in
fact echo 1 or echo "1" will do the same thing.)

If instead you were using ? as the string:
$ echo ?
p z
$ echo "?"
?

because ? is a glob, 1 isn't.  I ran those in a directory with two
files named "p" and "z".  If I cd somewhere without one-char filenames:
$ echo ?
?

			_Mark_ <eichin@thok.org>
			The Herd of Kittens
			Debian Package Maintainer