The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing. — Isaac Asimov

Recently I found a very handy command to copy your public ssh key to a destiation host.

All the time struggeling around with some xargs, pipes etc. to learn in the end that the command already exists.

How to use it:

ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub remote-host

Create dsa key pair:

ssh-keygen -t dsa

The whole article …..

Here's where a few examples would have helped.
To understand the man page I simply experimented 
with the echo command and several shell variables. 
This is what it all means:
      Given:
            foo=/tmp/my.dir/filename.tar.gz 

      We can use these expressions:

      path = ${foo%/*}
          To get: /tmp/my.dir (like dirname)
      file = ${foo##*/}
          To get: filename.tar.gz (like basename)
      base = ${file%%.*}
          To get: filename 
      ext = ${file#*.}
          To get: tar.gz 

      Note that the last two depend on the assignment made in the second one

Here we notice two different "operators" being used inside the parameters (curly braces). 
Those are the # and the % operators. 
We also see them used as single characters and in pairs. 
This gives us four combinations for trimming patterns off the beginning or end of a string:

${variable%pattern}
    Trim the shortest match from the end 
${variable##pattern}
    Trim the longest match from the beginning 
${variable%%pattern}
    Trim the longest match from the end 
${variable#pattern}
    Trim the shortest match from the beginning