UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Could someone please direct me to a link that gives the definitions for each of the letters from the results of the $- environment variable? It would be nice to know what shell options each of the letters represents, but I am specifically looking for the shell option for 'c' (lowercase c). Thank you.

Look at this thread for a start:
https://www.unix.com/unix-dummies-que...parameter.html

Thank you for the reply. Sorry I haven't replied to this sooner but I've been out.

The link provided simply says to look at the man page for setting shell options for your particular shell. Well, that was the first thing I did when I was trying to figure this out. Unfortunately, the man pages for bash and ksh do not detail exactly which letter is associated with which shell option, and the letter is certainly not the first letter of the option itself. Some of them are obvious, like 'i' for interactive shell. Some I could figure out by turning off an option and looking to see what letter no longer existed when echoing $-. Unfortunately some of the options could not be determined this way. And I'm still trying to figure out what little 'c' means (in addition to some others).

did you mean this??

No. What I'm talking about is the following. If you echo $- from your interactive login shell you'll get something like this...

$ echo $-
himBCH

Each of these letters represent some option that is turned on within the shell. For example, the 'i' (lowercase i) indicates an interactive login shell. Now, if I execute this same echo command from within a script that my dtsession login process executes when logging in, I get the following...

echo $-
hBCc

What I would like to know is what shell option the 'c' (lowercase c represents).

I think thats what i posted
It passes -c option to shell whos explanation is given in man page of ksh or bash or ...

I could be wrong, but I believe that is simply a command line option that you send to the shell when you're starting it. It's not a "switch" (so to speak) that you turn on or off for shell options from within the shell. For example, expand_aliases is a shell option that you can turn on or off. That particular option however, doesn't seem to have a letter associated with it when you execute $-. So, to see it's state, you have to execute the shopt command.

Anyway, maybe I'm mistaken about this whole thing, but what purpose would it serve to have $- report that the shell was started with some command string. You still wouldn't know what the command was, only that some command was executed, and it really wouldn't represent a switch for some option that is enable/disabled.