The brackets expand in place.  It does not expand your command, but instead the parameters.  Let's say I wanted to create a list of direcrories.   I could do something like this

$ mkdir -p a/{b,c/{d,e,f}}

This expands to

$ mkdir -p a/b a/c/d a/c/e a/c/f

Sidenote... what if you wanted a directory named abc and second one abcde?

$ mkdir -p abc{,de}

The comma with nothing before it, gives you abc, and the de after the comma gives you abcde

Does this make more sense?  apt-get is your command, and update and upgrade are the parameter to the command.  When you were using the curley brackets, you were expanding a single command with two incompatible parameters.

Hope this makes sense.

Kevin

On Dec 23, 2014 12:09 AM, "Michael Havens" <bmike1@gmail.com> wrote:

thank you so much. the way I figure it 'apt-get' is the command I'm expanding. But the command must be 'apt-get update, and 'apt-get upgrade'.

:-)~MIKE~(-:

On Tue, Dec 23, 2014 at 12:03 AM, Kevin Fries <kevin@fries-biro.com> wrote:

Michael,

As Matt said, braces expand into the same command, they are not used for multiple commands.  FOR is used for multiple commands.  While this is much more work in my opinion, this would also work... provided that there is no error.

$ for cmd in update upgrade; do sudo apt-get ${cmd}; done

This runs the two command in serial regardless of the results of either command.  My original answer did not run the second command if the first command failed.

Kevin

On Dec 22, 2014 11:55 PM, "Michael Havens" <bmike1@gmail.com> wrote:

thank you Matt and Kevin. I was looking for a way to combine the two commands with the curly brackets.

:-)~MIKE~(-:

On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 11:36 PM, Matt Birkholz <matt@birchwood-abbey.net> wrote:

> From: Michael Havens <bmike1@gmail.com>
> Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2014 15:46:23 -0700
>
> I was thinking, I could type in 'sudo apt-get update;sudo apt-get
> upgrade' but what would be a more efficient way?
>
> [...]
>
> sudo apt-get {update, upgrade}
> E: Invalid operation {update,
>
> This is interesting: when I typed in 'sudo {apt-get {update; upgrade}}' it
> didn't give me an error for '{update'
>
> So does anyone know what I'm talking about and how to do it?

Brace expansion is performed on a command.  A semicolon separates
commands.  Your command line

        sudo {apt-get {update; upgrade}}

is interpreted as two commands:

        sudo {apt-get {update
        upgrade}}

So sudo complains about a strange command name "{apt-get", the
argument "{update" passes without comment, and the shell complains
about the command name "upgrade}}".

You cannot stick an unescaped semicolon inside braces.

Most efficient?  Stick this in ~/.bashrc

        alias do-it='sudo sh -c "apt-get update; apt-get upgrade"'

so you can say just

        do-it

?
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