Re: [Help-bash] The difference between $* and "$*"?

[Seth David Schoen]

Peng Yu writes:

> Hi,
> 
> [...]
> 
> I'm trying to understand the different between $* and "$*". The
> following shows that they behave differently when IFS is not the
> default. But the above paragraph from the manual does not explain
> this. Could anybody let me know if this is documented somewhere else
> in the manual and how to understand the difference? Thanks.

Hi,

The difference is whether it "expands to a single word" or to multiple
words.

#!/bin/bash
cd /tmp
echo "... this is the file with a space in its name" > "X Y"
echo "... this is the file X" > X 
echo "... this is the file Y" > Y 

set -- X Y 
echo "Here is the unquoted version:"
cat $*
echo "Here is the quoted version:"
cat "$*"



In the two resulting invocations of cat, its argv argument arrays were,
first,

["/bin/cat", "X", "Y"]

and second

["/bin/cat/", "X Y"]

If IFS had been ":", the argv for cat would have been

["/bin/cat/", "X:Y"]

-- 
Seth David Schoen <address@hidden>      |  No haiku patents
     http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/        |  means I've no incentive to
  FD9A6AA28193A9F03D4BF4ADC11B36DC9C7DD150  |        -- Don Marti