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From: kjb@cs.vu.nl (Kees J Bot)
Subject: Re: Strange prompt after a mistyping
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Organization: Fac. Wiskunde & Informatica, VU, Amsterdam
Date: Sat, 20 Jan 1996 10:17:45 GMT
Message-ID: <DLH5xL.10C.0.-s@cs.vu.nl>
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ljnice@ouray.cudenver.edu (LINDSEY JEAN NICE) writes:

>If I mistype a command and put a ' after it, i.e. pwd', I end up with a
>> prompt and nothing seems to work except a ctrl-d to escape.
>What did I do and where did I end up?

The shell, the program that reads and executes commands, allows you to
quote arguments with either ', or ".  Examples:

	$ echo no     quotes    here
	no quotes here
	$ echo 'this      is   quoted'
	this      is   quoted

Thanks to the quotes the string "this      is   quoted" is seen as a
single argument to echo and not broken up into three arguments.  You can
even include newlines:

	$ echo 'one
	> two'
	one
	two

And that is where the > prompt comes into play, it is the shell's
"continuation prompt".  It indicates that the current command isn't
finished.

I could start to explain the other shell quote, ", but there are good
books that explain it much better that me.  Alas I don't know any
titles, I learned shell programming from the V7 UNIX manuals.
--
	                        Kees J. Bot  (kjb@cs.vu.nl)
	              Systems Programmer, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
