What the heck is this in my ~

[Scott Haneda]

On Jul 10, 2010, at 2:53 PM, Brandon S Allbery KF8NH wrote:

> Sorry for the shorthand.  You had selected and copied the output from a
> "port install" command, probably intending to paste it somewhere else;
> accodentally pasting that into a Terminal window sitting at a
> shell prompt will try to execute that output as commands.  Check your shell
> history for "--->".
> 
> (In case you're wondering, pasting "---> Computing dependencies for
> <something>" into a shell will result in the shell creating a file called
> "Computing" and complaining about not being able to find a command called
> "---", which it will have attempted to run with the parameters
> "dependencies", "for", and <something>.)

Ahh, ok, I get it now.  Its the ">" that is the command.  That was where I was hung up. I generally should be able to paste pretty much anything into the shell; unless it leads with touch, rm, cat, whatever, it won't do much.

But > is a command of sorts, and I should have known that, I use it all the time.

Rather than:
    `echo "" > somefile.txt`
To clear it out...
I will just do:
    `>somefile.txt`

In case anyone cares, another handy one that I use is when I forget `sudo`, I can re-run the command with a quick `sudo !!`.

Thanks everyone who helped me get this, makes sense now.
-- 
Scott (* For off-list contact, replace talklists@ with scott@ *)