Georg Baum wrote:
> From the bash manpage, section "Special Parameters":
>
> @ Expands to the positional parameters, starting from one.
> When the expansion occurs within double quotes, each parameter
> expands to a separate
> word. That is, "$@" is equivalent to "$1" "$2" ... When there are
> no positional parameters, "$@" and $@ expand to nothing (i.e., they
> are removed).
>
> If the arguments are "a" "b b" "c", for arg in $@ expands to the
> four tokens a b b c. for arg in "$@" expands to the three tokens "a"
> "b b" "c". I don't know if this is POSIX behaviour or bash specific.
Ok, understood. This is POSIX and has some quite complicated name. I
use it myself often:
echo "${FOO}" | sed '...'
will preserve any '\n' in ${FOO} so that sed acts on each line in
turn. In contrast,
echo ${FOO} | sed '...'
presents the entire string to sed as a single entity.
--
Angus
