Command substitution

In computing, command substitution is a facility that allows a command to be run and its output to be pasted back on the command line as arguments to another command. Command substitution first appeared in the Bourne shell, introduced with Version 7 Unix in 1979, and has remained a characteristic of all later Unix shells. The feature has since been adopted in other programming languages as well, including Perl, PHP, Ruby and Microsoft's Powershell under Windows. It also appears in Microsoft's CMD.EXE in the FOR command and the ( ) command.

Shells typically implement command substitution by creating a child process to run the first command with its standard output piped back to the shell, which reads that output, parsing it into words separated by whitespace. Because the shell can't know it has all the output from the child until the pipe closes or the child dies, it waits until then before it starts another child process to run the second command.

This C shell example shows how one might search for all the C files containing the string malloc using fgrep and then edit any that are found using the vi editor. The syntactical notation shown here, ` ... `, using backquotes as delimiters, is the original style and is supported by all the common Unix shells.

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