Here at muru's suggestion, seems I can ask for advice on documents here?

Oh awesome, here we go again.

@Caleb one of the disadvantages of "configuration as code" with behaviour mixed in :-(

@StephenKitt Yup yup. In this case I think it's worth it in the long run, but it's always a rude awakening when you login after an update and your window manager blows up in your face.

@Caleb I agree. It's one of the things package managers don't handle very well...

@Caleb LOL

@Gilles Thanks!

@StephenKitt You'd have been amused by the time I encrypted the system partition on my Android phone with a password that used characters not available on the boot-time keyboard.

@Caleb oh dear that's rather unfortunate

Ouch.

Continuing from yesterday with me playing with the parser:

$ type }

} is a shell keyword

$ }

-bash: syntax error near unexpected token ``}'

$ alias }=

$ type }

} is aliased to ``'

$ }

(nothing)

$ alias }={

$ }

@phk why don't you post a question about this? I'm sure that Gilles, Stéphane, Michael or one of our other users with strong shell-fu will give you more than you ever knew wanted to know about this. From your testing, it seems to come down to the order with which the shell parses things.

You seem to be showing that aliases are read before keywords here, for example. So someone who is familiar with the details of parsing precedence should be able to explain it well.

@terdon There is nothing to ask here, in fact I would flag my own question as "unclear what is asked" should I post it. ;) I was just playing around and I thought I might share it.

And thanks! I'm actually geeky enough to find this sort of stuff interesting.

I'm just thinking there is an interesting question in there, about the precedence of shell parsing.

At the very least the importance of being the first word.

BTW, what triggered it was unix.stackexchange.com/q/340997/117599 and me still trying to figure out what exactly the shell is doing. I have a much better understanding now but it's still not perfect.

I see we got a flying visit from Caleb.

@FaheemMitha Oh, he lurks, he lurks.

@rayandrews advice on which documents?

Well, I had a question frozen because it was considered to be a request for documents and that seems to only be allowed here. I'm struggling to get networking going and there's a million docs on the web, but so far all of them presume that you are already an expert, so I'm looking for advice on some doc that would be useful to someone who is not yet an expert. I just want to transfer some files and I don't want to spend the next several years figuring out how.

Ah, yeah, the "request for learning materials" close reason.

Yeah, it's fine to ask here.

You might also get suggestions here on how to break what you're asking for down into manageable sizes to post as questions on the site.

(I really need to finish up docs.google.com/document/d/… someday...)

@terdon "After a token has been delimited, but before applying the grammatical rules in Shell Grammar, a resulting word that is identified to be the command name word of a simple command shall be examined to determine whether it is an unquoted, valid alias name [...] the word shall be replaced by the value of the alias"

pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/…

alias begin={ end=} will also work as expected