Shell Programming and Scripting

Before you forget, you should put that into your ~/.exrc so vi always has it on your login!

One of my vi interview question answers was, to see hidden characters on a one time basis, ":.l". I missed that one, but they hired me.

I use "cat -vte" on problem files, too, to see control characters and spaces/tabs at end of line. It even works to look around in binary file streams without linefeeds.

It feels easier to see problems with "cat -vte" than with the more aggressive "od -bc", where lines are merged into a rectangle of dump.

I use << rarely, not because Imight forget that the control string must be on a line absolutely by itself, but because I like the finer control and the pipe-friendly data-up-front flavor of echo pipe to achieve the same end:

Code:

echo 'No $meta char in here
but \\.
'"You get expansion in here for $sure
"' but not $(here)!
' | whatever | more_stuff | more_yet | ssh2 some_host ksh

I usually start out my echo with the single quote and for stuff that needs expansion use the double quotes, like "$variable_name" or nothing, like $( command inline data generator ), which is somewhat implicitly protected.

This works especially well if you want the commands to run on a remote host, since the single quote keeps all the remote metadata unexpanded without individual escapes. Why write two scripts, when you can keep all the process in one, in sync.?