Date: Sat, 15 Mar 2025 23:59:24 +0100
From: Steffen Nurpmeso <[email protected]>
Message-ID: <20250315225924.1YC4dm9D@steffen%sdaoden.eu>
| |And further, i have zero idea how shells come to the result that
| |they do if they do *not* split the fields individually. But if
| |they do, how comes that additional field.
I could explain, as the NetBSD shell does the same thing as bash here,
but I don't really think there's much point.
| And even further, if that is not what is happening in any of the
| shells starting with ksh, then the standard wording is deficient
| and cannot be used by shell implementors to create identical
| behaviour to already (long) existing shells.
| What am i missing?
The standard says that any empty fields resulting from an unquoted $*
expansion may be deleted (same with unquoted $@). Existing shells
do different things (which is why the standard says that). Hence,
it is impossible to create identical behaviour with existing shells,
as they're not all the same - which is also why users should avoid
doing anything which might provoke those differences (which includes
using unquoted $* or $@ unless you're certain no empty fields exist).
I wouldn't go as far as greg and say never use it, I sometimes use eval
with such a thing, but only when I know that the positional params all
have properly quoted values (which the eval is being used to remove) and
so can never be empty (when the $* is expanded, after eval has done its
thing and the quotes are gone, there may be empty words, but not
resulting, then, from any expansions, so nothing will delete those).
kre
