[lug] help! shell script

[Tkil]

they can be accused of being grave accents, but they're not really (at
least not when used in an uncombined fashion).  when used as
diacriticals, yes, they are graves; but used standalone, they are most
often rendered as "opening single quote" by typesetting packages.
since the single-quote key (the one under the double quote, just
inside the enter key on sane keyboards) is often referred to as "tic"
("tick"?), i've most often heard the ` character referred to (in the
unix world) as the "backtic".

note that a grave accent typically has a distinctly different shape
than a backtick when rendered by a sufficiently precise system.  in
particular, here are some ISO Latin-1 characters for you to compare:

backtick:  `
a+grave:   à
a+acute:   á
tick:      '
acute:     ´

perusing a full dump of e.g. an Adobe Type 1 font would offer even
better comparisons.  it gets hairier: Turkish uses at least the "u"
with a sort of double-acute-accent that doesn't exist in Latin1 (you
need Latin5 or Latin2 for that, i don't recall which).  for more info
on this sort of thing, check out any good book on typography, the TeX
book probably covers it (particularly MetaFont), and there are some
good sites out there.  one of my favorites is:

   http://czyborra.com/charsets/iso8859.html

anyway, short version:  i've always heard ` referred to as "backtick"
on unix, since ' is a forward quote (parallels \ as backslash, since /
is a forward slash, or just "slash").

feel free to call it whatever you want, tho.  :)

t.
-- 
Tkil * <URL: http://slinky.scrye.com/~tkil> * hopelessly hopeless romantic.
  "So amplify this little one 	|   She hears as much as she can see
   She's a volume freak       	|   And what she sees, she can't believe."
        -- Catherine Wheel, _Happy Days_, "Judy Staring At The Sun"