Re: shell scripts, spaces, and backslashes

[Chet Ramey]

On 10/11/24 4:54 AM, Bruno Haible via Gnulib discussion list wrote:

I wrote:

Stackoverflow [1] says that word-expansion must be
avoided, because it does not support the spaces in arguments

These two examples show how non-intuitive shell scripts behave,
regarding spaces and backslashes in arguments:

$ printf '%s\n' a\\bc\ d\\ef
a\bc d\ef

$ var='a\\bc\ d\\ef'
$ printf '%s\n' $var
a\\bc\
d\\ef

Good luck understanding this!

Word splitting and quote removal aren't that bad.

--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    c...@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/

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