I have some variables in a bash script that may contain a file name or be unset. Their content should be passed as an additional argument to a program. But this leaves an empty argument when the va...

Before I asked, I did some googling, and was unable to find an answer. The scenario I have is this: A list of numbers are passed to the script, either \n-delimited via a file, or comma-delimited v...

Is there any way to reliably use an arbitrary globbing pattern that's stored in a variable? I'm having difficulty if the pattern contains both spaces and metacharacters. Here's what I mean. If I ha...

I notice in most scripts, the two are usually in the same line as so: SETLOCAL ENABLEDELAYEDEXPANSION Are the two in fact separate commands and can be written on separate lines? Will setting EN...

I'm new in shell programming on macosx and have a little problem. I've written the following shell script: #!/bin/sh function createlink { source_file=$1 target_file="~/$source_file" if [[ -f $...

I saw someone mention the reword function today, but documentation for it is very brief. It looks like shell script environment variable substitution, or maybe regex substitution, but different. Ho...

I have a small problem trying to unzip a file using the 7za command-line utility in Powershell. I set the $zip_source variable to the zip file's path and the $unzip_destination to the desired outp...

On this line: GCCVER:=$(shell a=`mktemp` && echo $'#include <stdio.h>\nmain() {printf("%u.%u\\n", __GNUC__, __GNUC_MINOR__);}' | gcc -o "$a" -xc -; "$a"; rm "$a") I get: *** unter...

I ran into ss64.com which provides good help regarding how to write batch scripts that the Windows Command Interpreter will run. However, I have been unable to find a good explanation of the gramma...

I have a file called "physics 1b.sh". In bash, if I try x="physics 1b" grep "string" "$x".sh grep complains: grep: physics 1b: No such file or directory. However, when I do grep "string" phy...

I have encountered a most annoying problem that occurs on the PWD variable when the current path includes a space. My code looks somewhat like this: mycommand |sed -E ' s|mystuff|replacement| ; s...

I have a file (directories.txt) with directory names, each on a single line and I like to expand the line C:\Documents and Settings\%USERNAME%\My Documents In my script to the real user name run...

I'm trying to get a variable expanded in a command call. Here's what I have in my .vimrc: command! -nargs=1 -complete=dir TlAddPm call s:TlAddPm(<f-args>) function! s:TlAddPm(dir) let flist...