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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting What does this do in bash: ${pid:-} Post 302245990 by jim mcnamara on Sunday 12th of October 2008 07:25:24 AM
Old 10-12-2008
The code is making sure that if the pid variable is unset it becomes null (or zero-length).
unset and null are different. null means that variable exists in memory and is "", unset means bash never heard of it before.

In coding, whenver you create a new variable you want to set it to a known state. In C you set a string to be zero-length, an integer to zero. This is the same idea.
 

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unset(3tcl)						       Tcl Built-In Commands						       unset(3tcl)

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

NAME
unset - Delete variables SYNOPSIS
unset ?-nocomplain? ?--? ?name name name ...? _________________________________________________________________ DESCRIPTION
This command removes one or more variables. Each name is a variable name, specified in any of the ways acceptable to the set command. If a name refers to an element of an array then that element is removed without affecting the rest of the array. If a name consists of an array name with no parenthesized index, then the entire array is deleted. The unset command returns an empty string as result. If -nocom- plain is specified as the first argument, any possible errors are suppressed. The option may not be abbreviated, in order to disambiguate it from possible variable names. The option -- indicates the end of the options, and should be used if you wish to remove a variable with the same name as any of the options. If an error occurs, any variables after the named one causing the error are not deleted. An error can occur when the named variable does not exist, or the name refers to an array element but the variable is a scalar, or the name refers to a variable in a non-existent namespace. EXAMPLE
Create an array containing a mapping from some numbers to their squares and remove the array elements for non-prime numbers: array set squares { 1 1 6 36 2 4 7 49 3 9 8 64 4 16 9 81 5 25 10 100 } puts "The squares are:" parray squares unset squares(1) squares(4) squares(6) unset squares(8) squares(9) squares(10) puts "The prime squares are:" parray squares SEE ALSO
set(3tcl), trace(3tcl), upvar(3tcl) KEYWORDS
remove, variable Tcl 8.4 unset(3tcl)
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