bash Cookbook

Appendix C. Command-Line Processing

Throughout the book we’ve seen a variety of ways in which the shell processes input lines, especially using read. We can think of this process as a subset of the things the shell does when processing command lines. This appendix provides a more detailed description of the steps involved in processing the command line and how you can get bash to make a second pass with eval. The material in this Appendix A also appears in Learning the bash Shell by Cameron Newham (O’Reilly).