Re: Word splitting in parameter expansion

[Peter Stephenson <pws@csr.com>]

=?iso-8859-1?Q?Bj=F6rn_Lindstr=F6m?= wrote:
> I've got this in my .zshrc:
> 
>     man() {
>         screen -h 0 -t "man $@" man $@
>     }
> 
> This works fine as long as I only supply the function with one argument,
> such as "man access", but when I do "man 5 access", it interprets
> "5 access" as one argument (even though that is not what I meant ;-).

I don't think it's doing quite what you say (although you don't see what
options you have set), but I agree it won't do what you expect...

If the arguments are `5' and `access' I would expect the words to be
divided as:

screen
-h
0
-t
man 5
access
man
5
access

(which is certainly what I get with my option settings).  The problem is
that the argument to -t is being divided into two parts.  To prevent that
you need:

man() {
    screen -h 0 -t "man $*" man $@
}

Actually, that last argument could be $* as well; if you want to
maintain zero-length arguments it needs to be "$@".

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@csr.com>                  Software Engineer
CSR Ltd., Science Park, Milton Road,
Cambridge, CB4 0WH, UK                          Tel: +44 (0)1223 692070


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