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Re: stupid spaces in environment vars
This is not a bug, you're just not listening to what people are telling you.
As Brian said, "In general whenever you have a variable that might
contain spaces you just need to quote it."
SO...
On 2/8/07, David Bear wrote:
thanks you very much. However, there is still something that doesn't work.
Here's a simple script that has problems.
#!/bin/sh
# the user has write access to
src=`cygpath $USERPROFILE`
should be:
src=`cygpath "$USERPROFILE"`
echo $src
should be
echo "$src"
r='snapshot1.pp.asu.edu'
opts=" -av --dry-run -e ssh"
rsync $opts "$src/" $USER@$r:~/$HOSTNAME
though the quoting doesn't matter much for the `echo' command, since
`echo' just concatenates its arguments with spaces. Your way, you're
passing cygpath two separate arguments, separated by the space in
$USERPROFILE, and it's translating each of them separately and
printing each one on a new line. That's clearly wrong. If you put
"$USERPROFILE" in double quotes, cygpath sees it as one argument and
translates it as one argument. That's just how quoting the character
that separates arguments needs to be; there's no way around it, and
quoting properly is much easier than embedding backslashes.
Think about why it needs to be this way; your rsync command is a
perfect example!
rsync $opts "$src/" $USER@$r:~/$HOSTNAME
even though $opts has spaces in it, you want it to be interpretted as
many separate arguments, so you don't quote it. Since $src is one
argument, and it has spaces, you need to quote it. If all variables
were substituted as one word, you wouldn't even be able to pass $opts
as the 4 separate arguments that rsync expects!
~Matt
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