Apostrophe woes

[Gary Weimer 253-7796]

In article <16829 at leadsv.UUCP>, schip at sgi400.msd.lmsc.lockheed.com (Jan
Schipmolder) writes:
|> I don't know why your system is giving you problems. But, on my
|> system, the following two commands have the same identical effect:
|> 
|> echo `date`
|> date
|> 
|> Since they both have the same effect, why insist on using one and not the
|> other?

Unfortunately:

    date;echo ":ERROR routine error"
and
    echo `date`":ERROR routine error"

do not have the same affect. Fortunately, Unix always has more that one
way to do things. So we can do the following:

    (date;echo ":ERROR routine error")|awk '{str=str $0}END{print str}' -

NOTE: if you must flame this because you're humor impared and you think
it's a serious post, at least substitute awk with something with a shorter
start-up time before flaming...

weimer at ssd.kodak.com ( Gary Weimer )