All the chapters from this here are written by Brian Ward.
Text that looks like this
is either something that appears on
your screen, a filename, or something that can be directly typed in, such as a
command, or options to a command (if you're looking
at a plain-text file, it doesn't look any different). Commands and other
input are frequently quoted (with ` '), which causes the following
classic punctuation problem: if such an item appears at the end of a sentence
in quotes, people often type a `.' along with the command, because the
American quoting style says to put the period inside of the quotation
marks. Even though common sense (and unfortunately, this assumes that the
one with the ``common sense'' is used to the so-called American style of
quotation) should tell one to strip off the
punctuation first, many people simply do not remember, so I will place
it outside the quotation marks in such cases. In other words, when
indicating that you should type ``make config
'' I would write
`make config
', not `make config
.'