Why update Swahili?

[Andras Simon]

On 9/23/09, gilpel at altern.org <gilpel at altern.org> wrote:
>> gilpel at altern.org wrote:
>>>>> Those packages provide contributed multilingualization (m17n) input
>>>>> maps
>>>>> for... whatever the language.
>>>> If you don't need them, just say
>>>> yum erase m17n\*
>>>
>>> Yeah, I suppose with yum they wouldn't come back. But what is the
>>> backslash for? Can't find any backslash in the yum man page.
>>>
>>
>> The backslash is to prevent the shell from expanding the asterisk and
>> passing on the asterisk to yum literally. Its called escaping a special
>> character. Try looking for escaping characters in the bash man page.
>
> So, if I write
>
> rm m17n*
>
> it will remove all instances of m17n...
>
> but, because yum is not a bash command, the * has to be escaped?

No. Neither are bash commands, but you issue them in a shell (which,
in your case, is probably bash). Since the shell sees your command and
its arguments first, it can and does manipulate them. One thing it
does with them is expand special characters, such as * and ?; so
unless you escape those, yum or rm will never see them, only the
result(s) of the expansion. 'rm *' will remove all files in the
current directory, but 'rm \*' will only remove the one whose name is
'*'. See any intro to unix in general and shells in particular.

Andras