In the thread subject 'A "whatis" catalog', I was once again
mystified by the use of the dot in Unix-like systems. I originally
thought the use of dot was merely to state "here" or "from here" as
in the example of filesytems use:
ls .
sh ./myscript
But the dot turned out to be more than that when I saw people using
it in other ways; most recently from Ed Centanni's REply to my
question with this as the best working model:
apropos . | sort > mycatalog.txt
versus...
apropos * | sort > mycatalog.txt
I don't understand the literal interpretation of the dot in this
example versus using an asterisk. Actually, an asterisk doesn't
discover as many commands as the dot. In fact, doing a search for
the command chfn doesn't come up in the asterisk solution, yet it
comes up in the dot solution. This seems opposite of what would work
in the DOS world--which is my background.
URL reading sources are fine. I just want to understand how to
utilize this little gem in other ways...if there are any more.
Thanks,
Mario
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Fri Aug 01 2014 - 20:27:32 EDT