On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 4:21 PM, luiscolorado <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hello, everybody... I'm suffering a huge problem with the "for" command
> because it wants to parse a variable ignoring escape characters.
>
> For example, as you know, if I do something like this in bash:
>
> for i in sony apple "hewlett packard"
> do
> echo $i
> done
>
> It will echo the following:
>
> sony
> apple
> hewlett packard
>
> However, I have a program that generates a list of files (let's say like the
> previous one) that I want to use. This is what I get when some file names
> have spaces:
>
> for i in `my-program`
> do
> echo $i
> done
>
> It echoes the following:
>
> sony
> apple
> hewlett
> packard
>
>
> Did you notice how it broke "hewlett packard" in two separate strings? That
> is, it uses the spaces to parse the file names!
Quotes or escapes in the output of the `` are input to the shell rather
than shell syntax, so won't be interpreted. You just need to quote more.
$ foo () { echo sony; echo apple; echo hewlett packard; }
Now note the difference between:
$ for w in "`foo`"; do echo $w; done
sony apple hewlett packard
and
$ for w in `foo`; do echo "$w"; done
sony
apple
hewlett
packard
and
$ for w in "`foo`"; do echo "$w"; done
sony
apple
hewlett packard
Why the first one does that I'm not sure, but it's the last one you want.
Dave
