Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Command substitution

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep. Black Kite 01:32, 12 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Command substitution

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Unreferenced article that is purely a dictionary entry and user guide. Subject already covered at C shell#Commmand Substitution but author contested redirection. I42 (talk) 07:18, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Merge or redirect to C shell. A plausible search term but too little information to have its own article. JIP | Talk 07:41, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Computing-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 16:47, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
If merged anywhere, it should be to Shell (computing). This feature is common to essentially every modern command-line shell (see its entry in Comparison of command shells). I'm fairly certain it didn't even originate in csh, but in the Bourne shell. —Korath (Talk) 17:18, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Keep. I created the page. I've been working on the C shell page, which implements command substitution using a particular syntax, namely, ` ... `. All the other common shell facilities (namely, piping, here documents, variables, control structures and filename wildcarding) have separate articles. Command substitution was the only common facility that did not have any article at all, much less something comparable. The C shell is not the only shell that has this feature nor even the first (Korath is right, it was the Bourne shell) and the syntax csh uses is not the same as used everywhere. For example, Bash uses $( ... ) instead and because it has distinguished left and right terminators, it can be nested without having to use escape characters. Even Microsoft's cmd.exe implements command substitution, but only as part of the for loop. Also, a complete article might outline some of the implementation details, for example, that typically only stdout, not stderr, is captured, and that the output is parsed into words by taking whitespace as separators (which can be problematic if filenames contain spaces.) So I think it's notable and I think it needs to be separate page. Msnicki (talk) 19:26, 7 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Keep Notable feature of numerous notable shell languages. Colonel Warden (talk) 22:43, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Weak Delete. Specifically do not merge with C Shell - a bunch of languages do this, just a question of whether it's notable -- samj _in ^out 01:32, 6 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. Feature has been adopted in an increasing number of languages and merits treatment on its own. --Lambiam 01:52, 7 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Keep I found this article because I wanted to show someone an overview of this common procedure that is available in several shells. The feature is important and is well known within computer science, yet treating it as a topic within one particular shell would make it hard to understand for someone unfamiliar with that shell. The nom's claim regarding a dictionary definition is not applicable: in the same way that Evolution is more than a dictionary definition of what is meant by "evolution", this topic is more than a dictionary definition of its name. Notability results from the frequent application of the technique, albeit within specialist documentation. Johnuniq (talk) 07:00, 11 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.