A 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

$ cp /etc/X11/xorg.{conf,conf.backup}

which produces the same result. An easy way to visualize this is using the following example:

**jacob@jakes-laptop:~$ echo a{r,l,cm}e

are ale acme**