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    Pedagogically, why would you put a question like that on a test? It's a corner case at best, probably a worst practice, and easily and habitually avoided by every "here document" writer ever. Sometimes you've gotta wonder about academics... Commented May 21, 2015 at 13:03
  • @Bruce: Pedagogically, because many students practice on and study from the many old exams that are readily available, and many students (and woefully many teachers) take a pattern recognition / memorization approach to learning (does anybody remember “flash cards”?) that leads to “educated” people knowing the answers to a large number of questions, and having some ability to adapt the answers to similar questions (e.g., if the answer to <<EOF is EOF, then the answer to <<foo must be foo) without really having the ability to answer questions or knowing the underlying theory.  … C’d Commented May 21, 2015 at 22:37
  • (Cont’d) …  So a teacher might strive to ask a question that isn’t trivially isomorphic to last year’s question (e.g., changing <<foo to <<bar is trivial) and that does challenge their understanding of the underlying rules and mechanisms.  That said, I agree with you; for a person to be able to answer that in a closed-book exam, he would have had to memorize every word of bash(1).  I personally, would have guessed that <<$fff would have a terminator of file.  … (Cont’d) Commented May 21, 2015 at 22:37
  • (Cont’d) …  This relates to a pet peeve of mine.  I don’t know what the problem is — it seems like some teachers have such a poor grasp of the theory themselves, that they compensate by teaching a million specific examples instead of teaching the theory.  I applaud test questions like “What is the library function that writes number to the standard output in a human-readable way?” and “What is the printf conversion type (i.e., the letter after the %) for printing floating point numbers?”.  I disapprove of questions like  … (Cont’d) Commented May 21, 2015 at 22:37
  • (Cont’d) …  “What is the exact, complete printf conversion specification to print a floating-point number with five character positions to the left of the decimal point (including - sign if appropriate, and leading spaces if necessary) and two digits to the right of the decimal point?” (unless it’s an open-book test).  I believe that there’s no benefit to memorizing the printf specs to that level of detail.  The first couple of times you need to print a floating-point number, you’ll check the man page.  If it’s something that you do often enough, you’ll learn it through repetition. Commented May 21, 2015 at 22:38