On 08/18/2011 11:38 AM, Stefano Lattarini wrote:
Hi Eric.
On Thursday 18 August 2011, Eric Blake wrote:
On 08/18/2011 08:44 AM, Eric Blake wrote:
how do I write a function that would print the same as
$ \ls | cat
Useless use of cat. This can be done with \ls -1.
f(){ for a in "$@"; do echo "$a"; done; }
Actually, echo "$a" is not portable - if you have any file names
beginning with - or containing \, then the results can be corrupted.
Or skip the loop altogether:
f(){ printf %s\\n "%@"; }
I think you've made a typo here; it should have been:
f () { printf %s\\n "$@"; }
Yep, slip of one key when I typed (at least on my keyboard, % and $ are
neighbors).
I guess that's what you meant, right?
BTW, is this behaviour truly portable to other shells and/or printf
utilities? POSIX seems to require it to portable, but you never
know ...
It's portable, but not always fast (some shells lack printf(1) as a
builtin, and end up spawning a process). And in the case of arbitrary
file names, printf is always better than echo, since it handles \ and
leading - correctly.
--
Eric Blake ebl...@redhat.com +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org
