Dammit Jim!

This is pretty basic knowledge but I’ve helped a few people out recently that had been using Unix/Linux for a while and didn’t know and it sure helped me out when I figured it out. If you had asked me how many quotation marks were on a keyboard before I started doing Bash stuff I would have said two. But I, and it seems most non-programmers, often forget the little ` on the same key as the tilde ~ (to the left of the numbers on standard keyboards). So there are actually three types of quotation marks and each one means something different to Unix:

I guess this is obvious to most people but it took me quite a while to dig it out on the internet. I wanted my bash script to be able to read from standard input like cat sourcefile.txt|bash myscript.bash. It turns out the standard input can be read from /dev/stdin. So if I wanted to sort the standard input, myscript.bash would look like: sort /dev/stdin

I think this is probably basic UNIX knowledge but I’m not a programmer.