Word splitting oddities (Was: Long filenames in DOS/Windows and Unix/Linux)

In article <slrnvdp692.1s5hi.candycanearter07@candydeb.host.invalid>,
candycanearter07  <candycanearter07@candycanearter07.nomail.afraid> wrote:
...

Only sometimes it doesn't :-)
>
    $ foo="foo bar"
    $ bar=$foo
>
No problem with the space in the expanded value here!
>
    $ echo $bar
    foo bar
>
but of course:
   ls $bar
   ls: cannot access 'foo': No such file or directory
   ls: cannot access 'bar': No such file or directory

>
Fair point. Field splitting happens after parameter expansion, except
when it doesnt.

>
>
Actually, echo is special since it just prints every argument it's
given.. both of these commands are working as expected with splitting:
>
$ echo some text
>
some text
>
$ ls some text
>
ls: cannot access 'some': No such file or directory
ls: cannot access 'text': No such file or directory

The point is still valid, even if the demonstration wasn't quite on-point.

When faced with the problem of needing to display a variable in shell, but
needing to know whether or not it is a single string or multiple strings, a
useful trick is to use "printf" like this:

    $ set -- this is "a test of" something
    $ printf "%s\n" "$@"

Then you would know for sure that in the example above, the variable "foo"
really did have the value "foo bar".

Note, incidentally, that in the example above, the statement: bar=$foo
pretty much has to be parsed as if $foo had been quoted, because the
alternative is much worse.  The alternative would be to interpret:

    bar=$foo
as
    bar=foo bar

which means to run the "bar" command with the env var "bar" set to "foo".

--
Trump has normalized hate.

The media has normalized Trump.