Re: weird echo behaviour...

[P]

Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
> Could someone explain the following behaviour for me?  Because I sure
> do not understand it.

Yes this is confusing but not incorrect.

> address@hidden:/tmp/foo$ touch 1 2 3 4 5
> address@hidden:/tmp/foo$ foo=`ls`

$foo will contain the string 1\n2\n3\n4\n5\n

> address@hidden:/tmp/foo$ /bin/echo $foo
> 1 2 3 4 5

This will first parse the string into seperate
parameters to pass to echo which it outputs with spaces in between

> address@hidden:/tmp/foo$ /bin/echo "$foo"
> 1
> 2
> 3
> 4
> 5

The quotes stop the parsing of the string into seperate params,
so echo will output the unparsed string containing newlines.

Pádraig.