Linux for Beginners Part 5 (Using Brace Expansion Characters)
In this video tutorial, we continue to show you how to use Command Line On Linux Operating System.
- By using curly braces ({}), you can expand out a set of characters across filenames, directory names, or another argument you give commands.
- For example, if you want to create a set of files such as memo1 through
memo5, you can do that as follows:
$ touch memo{1,2,3,4,5}
$ls
memo1 memo2 memo3 memo4 memo5
- The items that are expanded don’t have to be numbers or even single digits.
- For example, you could use ranges of numbers or digits. You could also use any string of characters, as long as you separate them with commas.
Here are some examples:
$ touch {John, Bill, Sally}-{Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner}
$ ls
Bill-Breakfast Bill-Lunch John-Dinner Sally-Breakfast Sally-Lunch Bill-Dinner John-Breakfast John-Lunch Sally-Dinner
$ rm -f {John, Bill, Sally}-{Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner}
$ touch {a..f}{1..5}
$ ls a1 a3 a5 b2 b4 c1 c3 c5 d2 d4 e1 e3 e5 f2
f4 a2 a4 b1 b3 b5 c2 c4 d1 d3 d5 e2 e4 f1 f3 f5
- In the first example, the use of two sets of braces means John, Bill, and Sally each have filenames associated with Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner. if I had made mistake, I could easily recall the command and change touch to rm -f to delete all the files.
- In the second example, the use of two dots between letters a and f and numbers 1 and 5 specifies the ranges to be used.
And if you did not watch a previous part where we have discussed a how you can use metacharacters and operators command then we highly recommend to check this out!
For this type of project, you will need to install and run the Linux OS of any version that you like.
In our case, we will be using Raspberry PI 3 as a Linux source, since it’s much easier to connect to it than just run a virtual machine on your main OS if you do not use Linux as your primary OS.
What you need for this project:
- A computer on which Linux is installed.
Note. In this project, we will not explain how to use the Putty software to connect Telnet to your Raspberry Pi.
If you are interested, you can watch the video:
