ing to print the last four characters of $a. The problem is that ${param:-word} already has a well-defined... bscure you almost never see them used. One of the problems is that the man page offers no examples.
Here I... "null" entry if we do it the other way. The same problem would have occurred in the previous example -- if... imal strings. Encoding is useful to avoid quoting problems when invoking a script from another one.
If thi