I knew that but what function does the \ accomplish in Linux?
It can be used for different things in different places, but it is often used to indicate continuation of commands. I.e., if you want or need to separate a command into multiple lines of entry, type a \ as the last character of a line, then continue typing on the next line.
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The \ also is used to remove or “escape” the special meaning of a lot of characters and is often referred to as the “escape character”.
For example we use something like “echo $PATH” to see how the path is defined in our environment and the $ is a special character. To change that to a literal $ it would be used as \$, so the output of “echo \$PATH” would be totally different. Try it and see.
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thanks for explaining that Tim
I thought that was the “-”
for example in debian based systems i beleive an example would be:
apt-get install
or software-centre
could you give me an example?
ah yes I beleive I saw this in my MATLAB program somewhere.
I will try it now thanks JV !
pacman -Qs \
nvidia
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In order to display the \ you must enter it as ‘\\’. It needs to be “escaped” in order to display on the forum posts.
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