Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 21:27:05 -0500 From: Dan Nelson <dnelson@allantgroup.com> To: Chuck Swiger <cswiger@mac.com> Cc: Rob Lahaye <lahaye@users.sourceforge.net> Subject: Re: tcsh script: quote and spaces problems Message-ID: <20030801022705.GC13080@dan.emsphone.com> In-Reply-To: <3F29CD39.9080505@mac.com> References: <3F29C589.4030009@users.sourceforge.net> <3F29CD39.9080505@mac.com>
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In the last episode (Jul 31), Chuck Swiger said:
> Rob Lahaye wrote:
> [ ... ]
> >Any solutions for this problem with quotes and spaces in tcsh
> >script? Or is tcsh not suitable for this kind of things?
>
> Ugh, the latter. :-) /bin/sh handles nested quoting right, but crunches
> the space together:
>
> % foo="-f \"t \""
> % echo $foo
> -f "t "
>
> % foo='-f "t "'
> % echo $foo
> -f "t "
Actually it doesn't. You get this result because sh splits variables
on $IFS before passing the result to a command, so what echo gets is
argv[1]="-f \"t"
argv[2]="\""
, and echo always prints its arguments separated by a space. You can
verify that the variable is set correctly by running "set | grep -a
foo". To pass the entire string as one argument, run echo "$foo".
> ...however, you might be able to muck with $IFS and get better results.
> Also, ZSH seems to do exactly what you expected:
>
> 64-sec% foo="-f \"t \""
> 65-sec% echo $foo
> -f "t "
This is because zsh passes variables directly to commands, unless the
SH_WORD_SPLIT flag is set. You can force spltting with the ${=foo}
syntax.
--
Dan Nelson
dnelson@allantgroup.com
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