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Re: bash manual on interactive shell
From: |
Lawrence Velázquez |
Subject: |
Re: bash manual on interactive shell |
Date: |
Mon, 13 Dec 2021 01:08:20 -0500 |
User-agent: |
Cyrus-JMAP/3.5.0-alpha0-4514-g2bdc19e04f-fm-20211209.002-g2bdc19e0 |
On Sun, Dec 12, 2021, at 9:03 PM, Mallika wrote:
> I'm a little confused about how all the and's and or's combine (I suppose
> it's obvious if you're a little more familiar with the material - but it
> would be great if it were possible to express this by indentation),
It's a relatively confusing state of affairs. An unordered list
might help.
> but I'd actually decided to write in just to clarify that first line:
> "started without non-option arguments,"
>
> Does "option arguments" mean "option*al* arguments"?
No. While all option arguments happen to be optional, not all
optional arguments are options.
An "option argument", roughly speaking, is an argument that begins
with one or two hyphen-minuses and affects the configuration of the
invoked shell. They are described here:
https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Invoking-Bash.html
> If the double-negative* is *actually correct, wouldn't the same sentiment
> be expressed by "started with only option(al?) arguments"? Double-negatives
> are inherently confusing, so it would be helpful to avoid them.
Something like "with only option arguments" could easily be
misunderstood as "with one or more option arguments".
--
vq