From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu From: "Douglas A. Gwyn" Message-ID: <3D1C7E27.1FE4528E@null.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <4d7f9df5442409dfaf2c76c812c4c7a5@plan9.bell-labs.com> Subject: Re: [9fans] dumb question Date: Fri, 28 Jun 2002 15:42:33 +0000 Topicbox-Message-UUID: bdbb51bc-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 "rob pike, esq." wrote: > ls quotes its output, ... > it seems the shell can and should be fixed. I don't see how to make it consistent with ls quoting. The root problem seems to be that ` applies parsing using white-space delimiters both when it is desired and when it isn't desired. What I think will be necessary is finer-grained control over "wordization". In the Bourne shell, that is done by setting IFS. It would probably suffice to consider newline reserved as a delimiter; while I have often found spaces in filenames to be useful, newline in filenames has never, in my experience, occurred except by accident. So "IFS='' sh whatever" should keep space- containing words as units in a similar usage. The question is, what would be a similar mechanism for rc that you'd find acceptable?