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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Bash : Why are spaces important here ? Post 302931766 by Corona688 on Thursday 15th of January 2015 10:18:30 AM
Old 01-15-2015
Because "[" is considered a command the same way ls is a command, not a special shell syntax. "[5" is a valid filename too -- if you had a file named "[5", it would run it, so if you don't mean "[5", don't tell it "[5" -- remember how shell syntax works, "command space arguments".

If you left spaces out of other commands, like lsfilename you certainly wouldn't expect that to work.

Last edited by Corona688; 01-15-2015 at 11:26 AM..
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shell(1F)							   FMLI Commands							 shell(1F)

NAME
shell - run a command using shell SYNOPSIS
shell command [command] ... DESCRIPTION
The shell function concatenate its arguments, separating each by a space, and passes this string to the shell ($SHELL if set, otherwise /usr/bin/sh). EXAMPLES
Example 1 A sample output of shell command. Since the Form and Menu Language does not directly support background processing, the shell function can be used instead. `shell "build prog > /dev/null &"` If you want the user to continue to be able to interact with the application while the background job is running, the output of an exe- cutable run by shell in the background must be redirected: to a file if you want to save the output, or to /dev/null if you don't want to save it (or if there is no output), otherwise your application may appear to be hung until the background job finishes processing. shell can also be used to execute a command that has the same name as an FMLI built-in function. NOTES
The arguments to shell will be concatenate using spaces, which may or may not do what is expected. The variables set in local environments will not be expanded by the shell because "local" means "local to the current process." ATTRIBUTES
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes: +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ | ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ |Availability |SUNWcsu | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ SEE ALSO
sh(1), attributes(5) SunOS 5.11 5 Jul 1990 shell(1F)
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