I am trying to become more familiar with using the builtin string matching stuff available in shells in linux. I came across this guys posting, and he showed an example
a="abc|def"
echo ${a#*|} # will yield "def"
echo ${a%|*} # will yield "abc"
I tried it out and it does what its advertised to do, but I don't understand what the $,{},#,*,| are doing, I tried looking for some reference online or in the manuals but I couldn't find anything. Can anyone explain to me what's going on here?