Re: Expansion of unquoted special parameter $@ when used as the word for a HERE STRING

[Chet Ramey]

On 11/5/19 5:15 PM, Robin A. Meade wrote:
> OK, thanks. I'll avoid unquoted $* and $@ in my scripts.
>
> However, I was testing the validity of this sentence:
>
> "In contexts where word splitting is not performed, this expands to a
> single word with each positional parameter separated by a space."
> – https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html#Special-Parameters
>
> That statement appears to be true for variable assignments:
>
> set -- a 'b   c'
> v=$@
> #  ^ word splitting does not occur in this context
> echo "$v"
>
> Prints:
> a b   c
>
>
> But not for here strings:
>
> cat <<< $@;
> #        ^ again a context in which word splitting does not occur
>
> Prints:
> a b c

Thanks for the report and discussion.

This is technically undefined, as explained in previous messages in this
thread, but I agree that it should be consistent between these two
contexts. I'll fix here-string expansion to make that work the same as
on the rhs of assignment statements.

Chet

--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    address@hidden    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/