One of the strongest assets UNIX® has is the ability to make shell scripts to ease users' lives. These scripts can range from simple one-liners to several thousand lines. Many times, shell scripts evolve into menu-based scripts, and the scripter wants to display more to users than simply scrolling text. Other times, a simple line or two of output are displayed to users, and the shell scripter wants to put emphasis on a warning message. Regardless of the complexity, scripters have always needed a way to change their output to bold, underline it, reverse the highlights, and so on. That's where tput comes into play,more...
Traditionally, Unix/Linux/POSIX filenames can be almost any sequence of bytes, and their meaning is unassigned. The only real rules are that "/" is always the directory separator, and that filenames can't contain byte 0 (because this is the terminator). Although this is flexible, this creates many unnecessary problems. In particular, this lack of limitations makes it unnecessarily difficult to write correct programs (enabling many security flaws), makes it impossible to consistently and accurately display filenames, causes portability problems, and confuses users. more ....
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