[TUHS] Use of "{}" in the Shell?

[Peter Pentchev via TUHS]

On Tue, Aug 04, 2026 at 02:09:22AM +0300, Peter Pentchev wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 04, 2026 at 08:24:57AM +1000, Dave Horsfall via TUHS wrote:
> > A long time ago, in a Unix manpage far away, I saw a reference to "{}"
> > which acted similar to "()" except that it did not fork e.g. "{exit}" would
> > do just that :-)
> > 
> > Does anyone know the provenance of this Shell?  I can't seem to reproduce
> > it on the MacBook or the FreeBSD box here (my Penguin box is currently
> > dead).
> 
> It should work on pretty much any Bourne-compatible shell, I think.
> However, there is one crucial point: you *must* place a semicolon between
> the last command and the closing brace, and if you write commands on
> the same line, you also *must* place a semicolon between the closing
> brace and the next command :)

And of course, I forgot to include an actually useful example:
something that was pretty common back when I wrote Makefiles for fun:

  gzip -cn9 repopush.1 > repopush.1.gz || { rm -f repopush.1.gz; exit 1; }

G'luck,
Peter

-- 
Peter Pentchev  roam at ringlet.net roam at debian.org peter at morpheusly.com
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