On Wed, May 17, 2000 at 04:29:33PM +0100, bobb at redbrick.dcu.ie wrote:
> The shell appears to interpret $$ as an instruction to generate a name
> vim blah.$$
>> And it opens a file "blah.10241"
It appears to, but what $$ is is a special shell variable which is the PID
of the current process, and it is very often used for just this i.e. to
generate (probably) unique filenames. If you want a bulletproof script, you
would need to check that your chosen filename (e.g. /tmp/mytemp.$$) doesn't
exist before creating it, whereas mktemp does that for you.
Regards,
Niall O Broin
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