Re: Combination of "eval set -- ..." and $() command substitution is slow

[Andreas Schwab]

On Jul 16 2019, Ilkka Virta <itvirta@iki.fi> wrote:

> On 15.7. 20:49, Robert Elz wrote:
>
>>                      printf '%s\n' "`printf %s "$i"`"
>>                      printf '%s\n' "$(printf %s "$i")"
>>
>> aren't actually the same.   In the first $i is unquoted, in the second it is
>> quoted.   
>
> Huh, really? It looks to me like the first one treats $i as quoted too:
>
>  $ touch file.txt; i='123 *'
>  $ printf '%s\n' "`printf :%s: "$i"`"
>  :123 *:

It is not portable, see the autoconf manual:

    ... is not portable, since not all shells properly understand
    `"`..."..."...`"', for example Solaris 10 ksh:

         $ foo="`echo " bar" | sed 's, ,,'`"
         ksh: : cannot execute
         ksh: bar | sed 's, ,,': cannot execute

    Posix does not specify behavior for this sequence.

Andreas.

-- 
Andreas Schwab, SUSE Labs, schwab@suse.de
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