Curly brace expansion in the Bash shell
Submitted by jacob on Thu, 11/19/2009 - 8:44pmA very handy trick using the Bash shell in Linux involves the curly braces. The Bash manual at gnu.org defines brace expansion as "a mechanism by which arbitrary strings may be generated."
I use this mostly when working with files, especially making back ups of configuration files. For example, to copy /etc/X11/xorg.conf to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.backup, you could do this:
$ cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.backup
or you could use brace expansion