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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Shell script newbie, what is problem with my script? Post 302619535 by Corona688 on Thursday 5th of April 2012 04:01:58 PM
Old 04-05-2012
Sorry, I missed your second question.

There's two differences.
  • ls prints lines of text. * sets arguments.
  • ls is an external program. * is a shell operator.

Arguments are the things you feed into a program, like so:

Code:
./myprogram 1 2 3

argument 1 would be 1, and so forth.

'echo' doesn't actually understand what * means. The shell translates * into a list of files for you, before the program is run. So you can use * anywhere a list of file arguments makes sense!

ls on the other hand, reads filenames by itself. It also has options to sort them (-t means sort by time ), and print extended information ( -l ) which * cannot do.
 

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look(1) 						      General Commands Manual							   look(1)

NAME
look - Finds lines in a sorted list SYNOPSIS
look [-df] [-tcharacter] string [file] The look command prints all lines in a sorted file that begin with string. OPTIONS
Uses dictionary order; only letters, digits, tabs, and spaces are used in comparisons. Searches without regard to case; treats uppercase and lowercase as equivalent. Ignores character and characters following it in the search string. If you specify look -tC ABCDE, the string ABCDE would become (in effect) AB, with CDE being ignored. This option is primarily for shell scripts, in which more than one string is being processed. DESCRIPTION
If no file is specified, look searches in the system word list /usr/share/dict/words, with the options -df assumed by default. The look command uses binary search. The -d and -f options affect comparisons as in sort. NOTES
In order to use the -f option, you must first sort file with the sort -f command; otherwise, look displays only lowercase items. If you do not specify -f, but specify a file (such as /usr/share/dict/words) that has been sorted with sort -f, look may not produce any output. EXAMPLES
To search a sorted file called sortfile for all lines that begin with the string as, enter: look as sortfile To search the system word list for all words beginning with smi, enter: look smi This might result in: smile smirk smith smithereens Smithfield Smithson smithy smitten FILES
System word list. SEE ALSO
Commands: grep(1), sort(1), spell(1) look(1)
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