[SOLVED] What is ">" in console?

Mr. Alex · 07-04-2010, 05:55 AM

When ">" appears below recent command and you can type there - what is it? Where to read about it?

pr_deltoid · 07-04-2010, 05:57 AM

It's stored in a variable called PS2. It's the second prompt.
http://www.davidpashley.com/articles/bash-prompts.html

Quote:

PS2 is the continuation prompt

AnanthaP · 07-04-2010, 07:23 PM

Means that as far as the shell is concerned, you didn't complete the previous command. Usually happens in development of awk, sed and other scripts when you leave out a bracket (parentneses). To come out, type a ";" (semi-colon) and review what you typed earlier.

OK

Mr. Alex · 08-18-2010, 10:12 AM

Quote:

To come out, type a ";" (semi-colon) and review what you typed earlier.

Try:

Code:

echo 'hello"

You won't be able to exit with ";".

sem007 · 08-18-2010, 10:18 AM

it is PS2 prompt. When you breake command using \ it will display ">" prompt

and when you complete command whole command will execute.

i.e

Code:

echo "Hello friends \
> how are you?"

hello friends how are you?

chrism01 · 08-19-2010, 04:39 AM

As mentioned, typically its the the 2ndary prompt eg if you have unmatched quotes (post #4) it's saying you need to close the quotes before it will action the cmd.
If you are good, you can write+run a shell script on the fly without creating a shell file eg

Code:

[name@host:/path]$ for file in `*.dat`
>do
>grep pattern $file
>done
[name@host:/path]$