Re: Wanted: quoted param expansion that expands to nothing if no params

[Lawrence Velázquez]

> On Mar 23, 2021, at 11:43 PM, Eli Schwartz <eschwartz@archlinux.org> wrote:
> 
> On 3/23/21 11:24 PM, L A Walsh wrote:
>> Too often I end up having to write something like
>> if (($#)); then <func|exec> "$@"
>> else <func|exec>      #<func|exec> = function or executable call
>> fi
>> 
>> It would be nice to have a expansion that preserves arg boundaries
>> but that expands to nothing when there are 0 parameters
>> (because whatever gets called still sees "" as a parameter)
>> 
>> So, example, something like:
>> 
>> $~ == "$@" #for 1 or more params
>> $~ ==  no param when 0 param, # so for the above if/else/endif
>> one could just use 1 line:
> 
> It's not clear to me, how you expect this to differ from the existing
> behavior of "$@" or "${arr[@]}" which already expands to <nothing>
> rather than an actual "" parameter.

The original message does recall the behavior of the earliest Bourne
shells [1][2], but that is surely not relevant here, given the use
of ((...)). Right? RIGHT???

  [1]: https://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/various/bourne_args/
  [2]: 
https://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/autoconf-2.70/html_node/Shell-Substitutions.html#index-_0022_0024_0040_0022

vq