This is the sort of trick where I present the code first and explainit afterwards:

arch=`(PATH=$HOME/bin:/local/bin:$PATH arch || echo unknown) 2>/dev/null`

(This has been slightly modified to keep the line length down; in thereal version, more things are added to $PATH . Note that this may beword-wrapped in your browser.)

This sets the $arch variable to the output of the arch command

A commentator on my entry on why your main program should be import able mentioned that a third reason is to beable to unit test your program. I agree with the sentiment in general,but in specific I've never been able to get unit testing of my mainprogram code to work very well.

While I can unit test most of the low-level code involved in a program,I've found that much of the high level code, the stuff that goes in themain program, has two