Re: Bash messes up spaces in command line agruments.

[Dave B]

On Tuesday 6 May 2008 16:20, Herrmann, Justin wrote:

> Description: When I try to pass strings inside double or single quotes
> as command line arguments to my Bash script, leading spaces, trailing
> spaces, and multiple grouped embedded spaces are removed from the
> string.  This also prevents me from passing in only a space or spaces as
> arguments to my script.
> 
> Repeat-By: Save this script as 'startup':
> 
> #!/bin/bash
> echo $#
> for ((index = 0; index <= $#; index++))
> do
> echo "$index |$(eval echo \${$index})|"
> done
> exit 0
> 
> then type: ./startup '     some       words          '
> 
> the script will print out:
> 1
> 0 |./startup|
> 1 |some words|

This is what I get:

$ ./startup '     some       words          '
1
0 |./startup|
1 |    some       words          |
# '     some       words          '

Note that a space is missing. Try using the simpler indirection notation:

$ cat startup
#!/bin/bash
echo $#
for ((index = 0; index <= $#; index++)); do
    echo "$index |${!index}|"                # Try using this
    echo "$index |$(eval echo \${$index})|"
done
exit 0

$ ./startup '     some       words          '
1
0 |./startup|
0 |./startup|
1 |    some       words          |
1 |     some       words          |
# '     some       words          '

I'm not sure about why, using your method, only a single space is lost
(instead of all leading, trailing and all but one intra-words).

I'm using 

$ bash --version
GNU bash, version 3.2.33(1)-release (i686-pc-linux-gnu)
Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

-- 
D.