Brace Expansion

A little known feature of bash is brace expansion. Brace expansion expands the items within the braces to the arguments adjacent to the brace.

Quick example:

echo foo{bar,car}
# yields
foobar foocar

What's the point?

You can use brace expansion in your shell scripts or for quick one-liners. An example:

cp foo.c{,.blah} # backup foo.c to foo.c.blah