[CentOS-docs] Suggestions on "I Need the Kernel Source" Wiki pages

Scott Robbins scottro at nyc.rr.com
Sun Jul 13 04:03:08 UTC 2008


On Sat, Jul 12, 2008 at 08:39:46PM -0700, Akemi Yagi wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 12, 2008 at 6:27 PM, Antti J. Huhtala <ahuhtal4 at welho.com> wrote:
> > Hi all,
> 
> Hi Antti,
> > d) Two attempts of 'rpmbuild' perhaps failed because I inadvertently
> > used single quotes or apostrophes around 'uname -m' instead of "`"s
> > (accent grave?). 
> 
> They are "back ticks" :-)  This is one of those things that might be
> regarded as Unix/Linux basics (?).  It feeds the output of the command
> inside the ticks to the shell.  In your case, `uname -m` produces i686
> which then will be used as the parameter for the --target= option.

This confuses many newcomers (and old timers with bad vision if they're
not paying attention.)

Is there any merit to substituting that with $().  (To the OP, original
poster, both the back ticks, to the left of the numeral 1 on a QWERTY
keyboard and putting something inside $(), e.g., $(uname -m) mean to
execute a command. 

I write many pages for the beginner.  As that was a common error when
people would read my pages, I then began making a point of explaining
what they were.  Finally, I decided that simply using $() was easier
than adding a sentence or two specifying that those were backticks.  :)

-- 
Scott Robbins
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