In plain old make you use them the same way you use curly braces in shell scripts. If it is in a shell script, then the the parenthesis signify subshell evaluation.

Ok, I can't script my way out of a papper bag, so I need help with this.I declare some variables at the prompt:export catname=Fluffyexport dogname=SpotI make a no-executable file called text.dat ...

Last month, we took a strange turn and actually just focused on the basics of shell scripting, special variable notation, rather than solving some complex and obscure scripting challenge. I'm going to ...

A special variable that I use with great frequency for helping create temporary file names is $$, which expands to the current process ID in the system. For example: $ echo $$ 3243 If you're doing a ...

Shell scripting is an often forgotten programming environment, relegated to simple automation tasks and little else. In fact, it’s possible to achieve much more complex tasks in the shell.

It is easy to dismiss bash — the typical Linux shell program — as just a command prompt that allows scripting. Bash, however, is a full-blown programming language. I wouldn’t pres… ...

Once you've got the Variables panel open, create a script with a few variable declarations in it and start a debugging session. In the example below, I've created a script and defined two variables.