On Fri, Oct 8, 2010 at 10:09 PM, Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda at gmail.com>wrote:

>
>
> On Fri, Oct 8, 2010 at 9:02 PM, K. K. Subramaniam <kksubbu.ml at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> On Saturday 09 Oct 2010 4:06:37 am Eliot Miranda wrote:
>> >     Bert is very probably right.  If you're suing bourne/bash then look
>> up
>> > the difference between $*, "$*", $@ and "$@".  To preserve spaces you
>> need
>> > to use $@/"$@" (depending on context" not $*.  Also within your script
>> you
>> > can use IFS to prevent space being a separator.
>> ‌$@ always uses space as word separator while $* uses the first letter of
>> IFS
>> variable. Otherwise they are the same.‌ Smalltalk uses spaces for
>> separator so
>> $@ will do.
>>
>
>
> No.  $@ expands to the argument list as supplied to the current command:
>


I should have written
     "$@" expands to the argument list as supplied to the current command:


>
>        *      Expands  to  the positional parameters, starting from one.
>  When
>               the expansion occurs within double quotes, it expands to a
>  sin-
>               gle word with the value of each parameter separated by the
> first
>               character of the IFS special variable.  That is, "$*" is
> equiva-
>               lent to "$1c$2c...", where c is the first character of the
> value
>               of the IFS variable.  If IFS is unset, the parameters are
>  sepa-
>               rated  by  spaces.   If  IFS  is null, the parameters are
> joined
>               without intervening separators.
>        @      Expands to the positional parameters, starting from  one.
> When
>               the  expansion  occurs  within  double  quotes,  each
>  parameter
>               expands to a separate word.  That is, "$@" is equivalent to
> "$1"
>               "$2"  ...
>
> So when invoking a command from within a shell wrapper one should use "$@"
> to pass on the parameters as this preserves whitespace within parameters.
> e.g.
> -----------8<----------- printargs -----------8<-----------
> #!/bin/sh
> while [ $# -gt 0 ]; do
>     echo "    ""$1"
>     shift
> done
> -----------8<----------- wrapper -----------8<-----------
> #!/bin/sh
> echo '$*'
> printargs $*
> echo '"$*"'
> printargs "$*"
> echo '$@'
> printargs $@
> echo '"$@"'
> printargs "$@"
> -----------8<-----------
> $ wrapper "hello world" hello world
> prints:
> $*
>     hello
>     world
>     hello
>     world
> "$*"
>     hello world hello world
> $@
>     hello
>     world
>     hello
>     world
> "$@"
>     hello world
>     hello
>     world
>
>
> HTH
>
>>
>> Subbu
>>
>
>
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