[PLUG] what does &(...) do?

Mike Connors mconnors1 at gmail.com
Thu Feb 16 19:52:05 UTC 2012


>
> Sorry to frustrate you with my sloppy cut and paste and brain addled
> proofreading.
> That should read:
>
>   Bash continues to amaze me.
>
> I know what & does in the general sense, and I suspect that &(...) forks
> off
> some processes from within a script.
>
> But
>
> I don't _know_ what that does. Lack of punctuation based searching in
> impeding my efforts to look it up.
> Having had to work last night (jobs are useful but sometimes ...)
> prevented me from experimenting.
>
> So I asked.
>

I'd be curious to see this in the larger context? "&" be used as a control
character among other uses. There does exist the command ((...))

--enable-dparen-arithmeticInclude support for the ((...)) command (see
Conditional
Constructs<http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html#Conditional-Constructs>
).

Single parens usually denote an expression "(value)" with a used in a test
utility. But the "..." is what really throws me. This is generally used as
a symbolic reference in describing BASH commands such as  name=(value1 ...
valuen).

Whatever the command syntax does, it seems to not be very highly
referenced...



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