@Ungeheuer Do you have to use MS Word?

@MyWrathAcademia The quotes are not passed as part of the argument. What you see in the trace output is just quotes inserted by the shell for the purpose of presentation. What quoting does is saying "this string is a single argument, don't split it into many arguments".

su -c 'echo a && echo b' passes the string echo a && echo b to su with no quotes, but as a single argument.

Just saw a relatable and thought provoking video

@FaheemMitha Unfortunately yes, unless I can make a persuasive argument to use a new word processor. Do you have any recommendations?

Also, turns out that when I was fixing that section so that the table, its caption, and the paragraphs describing it were on the same page, Word somehow set the "Style" for the paragraph to the caption style, so it started being wonky. No idea why it did that, perhaps the area of the documents the text moved to was caption-styled. Doesn't explain why those captions are linked though....

@Ungeheuer Some context would be helpful. What are you trying to do?

Personally, I do everything in TeX, but I realise that's probably not a popular choice.

@MichaelHomer @Kusalananda thanks for explaining that the string enclosed in single-quotes is passed as a single argument to su. And pointing out that the option -c is also a string parameter (i.e. argument)

@Kusalananda I'm still not completely sure what @MichaelHomer means by "The su command is not "in" any shell". Can you elaborate?

@MyWrathAcademia You wrote "Does su receive this single string argument in the new shell?". Michael's comment was probably about this. su is not "in a new shell". It may start a new shell though.

@Kusalananda that clears it up. So that means su is (called) in the current shell (session), right?

@MyWrathAcademia Yes.

@ilkkachu Thanks for correcting my silly error.

@overexchange you might consider giving your new questions a chance for regular visitors to see & answer them before posting them here. Late visitors to chat will find this particular question has already been answered. Just a suggestion.

ok

@FaheemMitha Software documentation. Guides, design descriptions, etc.

@Ungeheuer For yourself or for work?

The TeX family gets a lot of bad press (I think), but it's by far the most capable thing of its kind in existence, and mostly makes the competition look pretty silly.

And it's the only thing of its kind, for reasons I'm not entirely clear on.

But it's definitely not everyone's cup of tea.

It's not really hard if you just want to use it, but TeX programming involves significant overhead.

@Ungeheuer Snapshot the VM. When you're done, restore the snapshot. Everything that you created or changed after the snapshot is gone.

@Ungeheuer Depends who you're working with and how often you need diagrams. I've written this kind of document in markdown and it was very limiting.

Lately I've used Sphinx which is based on restructedtext which has a silly concrete syntax based on indentation, but is quite powerful and extensible. (Through ironically big parts of Sphinx are poorly documented.)

Asciidoc looks like it's a bit more convenient to use but a bit less convenient to extend, but I haven't actually used it.

@FaheemMitha Work. and we convert to PDF for delivery.

@Gilles Right now we use stateless VMs with some writable areas so writes don't persist after reboot. I'm trying to think of ways to zero out the writable areas without having to reboot. But there doesn't seem to be any easy way to do that without sacrificing security.

No good ideas yet that can be effective without sacrificing some of the core design principles that we have, which is a no-no :(