Linked Questions
17 questions linked to/from What does ` (backquote/backtick) mean in commands?
23 votes
2 answers
83k views
What is command substitution in a shell? [duplicate]
I'm using Ubuntu 16.04 with Bash and I tried to read in Wikipedia, in here and in here, but I failed to understand the meaning of "command substitution" in shell-scripting in general, and in Bash in ...
7 votes
1 answer
46k views
What is the ` character or symbol called and what is its significance outside of SE code formatting? [duplicate]
What is the ` character's name and what is its significance outside of SE code formatting because I cannot get it to work? I'm familiar with its use in the Stack Exchange forums used to format code ...
4 votes
1 answer
10k views
What does Linux accent-grave command do? [duplicate]
In a bash shell (A), typing an ` (accent-grave) will start another shell prompt (B). The output of any command entered in B is a command for A. $ ` > whoami` -bash: Joe: command not found (If my ...
-1 votes
1 answer
51 views
What is the difference betweem ` and ' in bash? [duplicate]
Today I noticed if I run: ldd `which bash` I get the expected output. But when I run ldd 'which bash' I get error ./which bash: No such file or directory. So what is the difference between the two ...
292 votes
6 answers
47k views
What's the difference between $(stuff) and `stuff`?
There are two syntaxes for command substitution: with dollar-parentheses and with backticks. Running top -p $(pidof init) and top -p `pidof init` gives the same output. Are these two ways of doing the ...
51 votes
5 answers
91k views
How to get milliseconds since Unix epoch?
I want to do a bash script that measures the launch time of a browser for that I am using an html which gets the time-stamp on-load in milliseconds using JavaScript. In the shell script just before i ...
56 votes
3 answers
116k views
Understanding backtick (`)
I am trying out the command $ b=5; echo `$b`; -bash: 5: command not found but it does not print 5 as it is supposed to. What am I missing here? What does ` (backquote/backtick) mean in commands? ...
18 votes
2 answers
19k views
Is the "tick" or "acute accent" character ´ (not `) used for anything in Linux shell?
We know that the backtick character is used for command substitution: chown `id -u` /mydir Which made me wonder: is the tick character ´ used for anything in the Linux shell? Note: incidentally, ...
18 votes
2 answers
5k views
Difference of using () and $() to execute a series of commands
I am currently trying to make a script that creates bytes that will be piped as input to netcat. Here is the idea of the script: (perl -e "print \"$BYTES\x00\"; cat file; perl -e "print \"More ...
5 votes
1 answer
5k views
creating alias for cmd with backticks
I'm working in tcsh. How do I create an alias for: nc stop `nc list | awk '/Running/{print $1}'` I tried various variations of: alias ncstop "nc stop `nc list | awk '/Running/{print $1}'`" but none ...
0 votes
1 answer
4k views
Rsync bash script error (sending: command not found)
I have a backup script for my server that mostly works. Only the the rsync commands throw an error in the log I can't find a solution to. Here's part of my script (I removed the working stuff): #!/...
-1 votes
1 answer
2k views
Why isn't the ping command recognized by my bash script? (using Kali) [closed]
I'm following along the book "Penetration Testing: A hands-on...." and have hit a road bump in executing this simple bash script. The script basically looks pings all 254 hosts on the designated ...
1 vote
2 answers
1k views
What is the effect of a lone backtick at the end of a command line?
I accidentally typed in cd ` into terminal today and terminal didstrange things. It put a "> " signed on the next line followed by my cursor like it wanted some input. No matter what I entered ...
0 votes
1 answer
407 views
Is listing files with ls dangerous as stated on gnu.org documentation?
Is listing files with ls dangerous? If I run just ls command in a directory with unknown files, can something bad happen? Can you show me examples how running ls command is dangerous as stated in this ...
0 votes
1 answer
186 views
What does ` in Linux means? [duplicate]
What does ` in Linux means? The sign with tilde on keypad. Does it evaluates the expression?