[mdlug] Evil URLs at OpenSuSE

[Michael Corral]

2007-03-01, Monsieur Fati a ecrit:
> On 2/24/07, Aaron Kulkis <akulkis3 at hotpop.com> wrote:
>> If it's on the command line... the ":" is probably the problem...
>> which is escaped with the backslash in most shells
>>
> Why on earth would : be a problem to the shell?  It's not a reserved
> character for anything that I know of.

It is a reserved character (actually, a built-in command) in bash,
Bourne shell and Korn shell. It's the null command, whose purpose is
to do nothing. It is commonly used in if-else constructs (e.g. when
you don't want to do anything if some condition is met) and in while
loops when you want to loop forever. For example,

while :
do
    echo "$(date)"
done

Run that and see what happens. :)

Michael