In plain old make you use them the same way you use curly braces in shell scripts. If it is in a shell script, then the the parenthesis signify subshell evaluation.

Last month, we took a strange turn and actually just focused on the basics of shell scripting, special variable notation, rather than solving some complex and obscure scripting challenge. I'm going to ...

Ok, I can't script my way out of a papper bag, so I need help with this.I declare some variables at the prompt:export catname=Fluffyexport dogname=SpotI make a no-executable file called text.dat ...

Shell scripting is an often forgotten programming environment, relegated to simple automation tasks and little else. In fact, it’s possible to achieve much more complex tasks in the shell.

Try this snippet to see what I'm talking about: echo "arg1 = $1" ; shift ; echo "now arg1 = $1" The variable $0 is a special one in this sequence. It's the name of the script or program invoked. This ...