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The following is a brief description of the shell's operation when it
reads and executes a command. Basically, the shell does the
following:
-
Reads its input from a file (see section Shell Scripts), from a string
supplied as an argument to the `-c' invocation option
(see section Invoking Bash), or from the user's terminal.
-
Breaks the input into words and operators, obeying the quoting rules
described in section Quoting. These tokens are separated by
metacharacters
. Alias expansion is performed by this step
(see section Aliases).
-
Parses the tokens into simple and compound commands
(see section Shell Commands).
-
Performs the various shell expansions (see section Shell Expansions), breaking
the expanded tokens into lists of filenames (see section Filename Expansion)
and commands and arguments.
-
Performs any necessary redirections (see section Redirections) and removes
the redirection operators and their operands from the argument list.
-
Executes the command (see section Executing Commands).
-
Optionally waits for the command to complete and collects its exit
status (see section Exit Status).
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