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What is the difference between these two lines? What does the minus sign at the end do, or don't do? I am running Fedora 20 -64 bit - on VMware Workstation 10. Thank you very much.
df -h
df -h -
php -v
php -v - what does v mean?
rpm -qa
rpm -qa - what does -q-a mean?
mySQL -v
mySQL -v - same question
mySQL -V
mySQL -V - same question
Last edited by phillyfilly; 02-09-2014 at 09:27 PM.
there are some common flags, like -v means -verbose or -version, -l means long format, -h help, but you always need to check the manual page, because they may have different meaning.
The - (minus) sign usually means the actual process will use stdin as input instead of a file. Is accepted only where it has any meaning (df need no input file).
see for example man grep:
Quote:
Description
grep searches the named input FILEs (or standard input if no files are named, or if a single hyphen-minus (-) is given as file name) for lines containing a match to the given PATTERN. ...
The - (minus) sign usually means the actual process will use stdin as input instead of a file. Is accepted only where it has any meaning (df need no input file).
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