On 1/30/13 2:47 AM, Dan Douglas wrote:
> No, $* always expands to a single word. If multiple words result, those are
> the result of field-splitting, not an intrinsic multi-word expansion as in
> the
> case of $@. Though POSIX says very little about the unquoted cases.
I haven't looked at the rest of this, but the situation is clearly not as
absolute as you've phrased it. In a scenario where word splitting is not
performed, say when IFS is null, there are shells that expand $* to
multiple words (bash, ksh93, FreeBSD sh), those that expand $* to a single
word separated by spaces (posh, mksh, SVR4.2 sh), and those that expand $*
to a single word with the positional parameters concatenated (dash).
Personally, I think the phrase "expands to the positional parameters,
starting from one" supports the bash/ksh93 behavior.
Chet
--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, ITS, CWRU [email protected] http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/
