Re: [PLUG] Building a command from variables in BASH

[Edmond Rodriguez <erodrig97.list@gmail.com>]

Thanks for this:  As arguments,  I very much understand your
presentation , as I was taking the quotes literally and it seems
sensitive to how strings/args are built and represented.  I was also
working under the premise that the structure was such that typing the
command straight into a command line (with the variables too) would
work (before going to eval). (but now I would want to experiment more
with that).

You present some very nice execution issues that can creep up on
someone, which I have spent some time playing with.  Thanks for your
comments.

Here is something new I tried while trying your scripts, but probably
not full proof?  I did not investigate further.  Just playing around a
little with the case you presented.     It worked in this case.  Maybe
you have some comments on what would be wrong with doing this:

The idea here would be to get away from the concatenated args and just
produce a string to work off of.
    args="-e 's/foo bar/far sar/g'"
    eval `echo "argtest $args"`

I guess this is getting into the "conjured up code" idea you were referring to.

I was trying think of what problems "echo" might create.  I tried the
following which seemed to work OK too:

args="-e 's/foo bar/far sar/g' '\n' '\`hello\`' 'abc def'"
eval `echo "argtest $args"`

Thanks for improving my bash knowledge!

Edmond

>
> just with an extra interpretation/expansion step to get there.  this is safe
> from embedded quotes and shell metacharacters, but will be problematic
> if you have whitespace in the variable.  consider the following for
> why it might not be desirable for the OP:
>
>        argtest(){
>          local i
>          i=1
>          while [ $# -gt 0 ]; do
>            echo "argument $i: ==$1=="
>            i=`expr $i + 1`
>            shift
>          done
>        }
>        args="-e 's/foo bar/far sar/g'"
>        argtest $args # or eval argtest \$args if you like :)
>
> this will pass 4 arguments to argtest instead of 2.  quoting $args would
> mean only 1 argument.  to preserve that information the best way to do so
> is to set the arguments as positional parameters (set+eval) and then
> expand them with the special syntax "$@", which expands to each individual
> parameter, quoted.  but if you're using set+eval, then you need an extra
> round of escaping/quoting (basically you'd be quoting them individually
> ahead of time).  that's what the articles linked in the last mail are
> all about.
>
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