Thanks, I'm actually agnostic about things like this (and disagree with any argument that one way should *always* be preferred). I just use whichever syntax is more readable in a given situation. In this case, I think `` is cleaner, because it stands out against the other $ chars in the string. Where there are quotes, I tend to prefer $(). As for nesting output capture, I just avoid it. I'll break it into two commands, the first being a variable assignment. As I've aged, I've shifted toward a preference for readability over hyper-efficiency and cleverness. ( More referring to C syntax regarding efficiency, it's a non-issue in shell commands). ;-)