Hi Cecilia, On 23 August 2012 14:18, Cecilia Chavana-Bryant <[email protected]> wrote: > recommendations, it would have put me off. At the beginning of Chapter 8 - > Moving around (pushd, popd) on Source: 13 exercise 8 I found this command: > mkdir -p i/like/icecream. I am guessing that the -p stands for directory > path? I have seen other such letters sometimes with or without the ' - ' > before them (I think) in commands so my question is, what are these letters > for? what are they called? and could someone please point me to where I can > find a list of these with descriptions of what they do.
These are variously called command "switches" or "options", thus named because they switch certain behaviours on and off or specify optional information to the command. On *nix like systems, you can usually find full and comprehensive documentation on any command using the "man" (for manual) or "info" (in lieu of information) commands. For example, try: man mkdir In "mkdir"'s case, the default behaviour/convention is for mkdir's parameter to specify the single folder name to be created in the current working folder. The "-p" switch modifies this behaviour so that the parameter is instead interpreted to be a full path that may include several folders, and the behaviour is modified such that mkdir then will, as needed, created all the folders along the entire path specified. HTH, Walter _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - [email protected] To unsubscribe or change subscription options: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
