spaces in pathnames

[Roland Mainz]

Jeremy Huddleston wrote:
> On Jun 29, 2008, at 19:18, Roland Mainz wrote:
> > Jeremy Huddleston wrote:
> >>
> >> So I just pushed a patch to xinit that addresses some issues with
> >> spaces in pathnames.  One issue remains, and I'm not sure if
> >> there's a
> >> clean way to address it.  At first, I thought I could do something
> >> like this:
> >>
> >> -    serverargs=${serverargs}" -auth "${xserverauthfile}
> >> +    serverargs=${serverargs}" -auth '"${xserverauthfile}"'"
> 
> > AFAIK on any POSIX-like shell a simple...
> > -- snip --
> > IFS=''
> > -- snip --
> > ... should fix the problem.
> 
> Yeah, but then we don't get separation when we do want it:
> 
> ~/src $ mya="some thing with spaces"
> ~/src $ myb="other spaces"
> ~/src $ myargs="-auth "$mya
> ~/src $ ./printargs "$myb" $myargs
> argv[0] = ./printargs
> argv[1] = other spaces
> argv[2] = -auth some thing with spaces
[snip]

What about using "shift" and then "$@" ([1], assuming the extra args
come at the end of the command line, otherwise you have to do the
"trick" with the "set" builtin below) ?

Example:
-- snip --
more_args="foo bar"

IFS=' ' set -- ${more_args}

printf "|%s|\n" 1 2 3 "$@"
-- snip --
(note that "printf" will repeat the format string until it's argv is
completely used-up - in this case the format string only "eats" one
argument and therefore it's repeated for each of the arguments).

The output should look like this:
-- snip --
$ ksh93 xxx.sh
|1|
|2|
|3|
|foo|
|bar|
-- snip --

[1]="$@" expands each element in the argument array to it's value
surrounded by double-quotes.

----

Bye,
Roland

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