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Shell as Interpreter (cont)

Basic operations in shell scripts are a sequence of words. 

CommandName  Arg1  Arg2  Arg3  ...

A word is defined to be any sequence of:

  • non-whitespace characters   (e.g. x, y1, aVeryLongWord)
  • characters enclosed in double-quotes   (e.g. "abc", "a b c")
  • characters enclosed in single-quotes   (e.g. 'abc', 'a b c')
We discuss the different kinds of quote later.