Re: Books or Debian wrong? and other stuff

[Jeff Noxon <jeff@planetfall.com>]

On Fri, May 08, 1998 at 01:07:44PM -0400, Thomas J. Malloy wrote:
> When I, an linux and unix novice, find that commands I am entering are not
> yielding the results I expect how do I know if this failure is caused by a
> program bug, an error in the book or man page, my error or something else?
> For example on page 104 of "Learning the Bash Shell" O'reilly there is the
> following command
>  vi $(grep -l 'command substitution' ch*)
> 
>  According to the text should load into the vi editor a file that is a list
> of the files in the PWD that begin with "ch" which contain the string  
> "command substition".  The man page for grep would seem to confirm this
> However when I typed
>  vi $(grep -l 'linux' *.txt) 
> it loaded all the documents into vi not a list of documents.  Is  the book 
> wrong?

The book is wrong.  Debian's behavior is correct.  You'd have to save the
list of files _to_ a file before vi would be able to read it as a list:

grep -l linux *.txt > tmpfile
vi tmpfile

Instead, what you're doing is feeding the output of the grep command to
the command line.  Try this for clarification:

echo $(grep -l linux *.txt)

Or this:

echo `grep -l linux *.txt`

> And as long as I am here, I have noticed that the escape charactor in 
> kermit does not work ^\.  Neither does there seem to be anyway to exit 
> dosemu other than killing the process.

Kermit is full of bugs, and hamm does not have a current version.

You can exit dosemu by running the "exitemu" program.

Jeff


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