On Fri, Apr 15, 2022 at 08:16:22PM -0400, Greg Wooledge wrote:
ls -l .bashrc You've got a command name, and you're passing two string arguments to it. If you feel a need to quote every string argument, then you should be writing it like this: ls "-l" ".bashrc"
There's nothing special about the command: "ls" "-l" ".bashrc"The key concept is that shell command lines *only* work on strings; unlike other languages, there's no "string" type that needs quotes and the only time you need do quotes is when dealing with special characters like spaces which would be interpreted differently without the quotes.