shell programming

[Terrence Enger <tenger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 2008-08-23 at 23:05 +0200, Lukas Beeler wrote:
  [snip]
> Well, the shell is also programmable. Shell scripts are very similar
> to CL, except less readable.

The languages are so different at to make comparison difficult, but for
lots of purposes, I agree that the extra verbosity of CL is a big help.

On the other hand, the shell provides sometimes-useful features like
word-splitting, regular expression tests, globbing, and so forth.
> Variable assignment in shell is foo='bar' (standard quoting rules
> apply - you can use ", ' or no quoting, depending on the string).

Remember however, that the kind of quoting matters.   For example (but
beware, because I am retyping this instead of copying and pasting) ...
    > c="one two"
    > for x in $c; do echo $x; done
      one
      two
    > for x in "$c"; do echo $x; done
      one two
    > for x in '$c'; do echo $x; done
      $c

Cheers,
Terry.