Unidentified subject!

[Uli Zappe <uli@tallowcross.uni-frankfurt.de>]

Hi,

first of all, I wrote:

>since I have a few questions concerning zsh somebody sent me the
>address of this mailing list but I don't know how to
>subscribe/unsubscribe (mechanisms differ widely...). Could a kind  
>soul please give me this info?

This mail has apparently already triggered the subscription  
mechanism by mentioning "subscribe" in the subject line, so no help  
is necessary anymore :-)

Now my problem which I find quite confusing:

I am porting a large and complex sh-script to zsh because I need  
the ability of zsh to deal with German Umlauts. While after some  
effort most everything works, I have encountered the following  
strange problem:

I have to create a list of file names to use it with 'cat' in a  
for-do loop:


   for VARIABLE in $VARIABLE_LIST
   do
      < generate the according filename FILE >
      FILENAME_LIST="$FILENAME_LIST$FILE "
   done


Now, if I do a 'echo $FILENAME_LIST' I get the wanted result

   FILE1 FILE2 FILE3...

However, if I then process

   cat $FILENAME_LIST

I get

   FILE1
   FILE2
   FILE3: No such file or directory

i.e obviously 'cat' treats all the files as a single filename; and  
this because the filenames for some strange reason are NO MORE  
separated by spaces but by newlines.

After endles tinkering I found out I can remedy this situation by doing a

   FILENAME_LIST=($(echo $FILENAME_LIST))

before applying FILENAME_LIST to cat; but that seems like a weird  
pseudo-tautological patch to me.


What confuses me most is the following:

If (just for test purposes) I define

   FILENAME_LIST=(FILE1 FILE2 FILE3)

instead of defining it by the for-do loop, everything works WITHOUT  
the need for the above mentioned patch. HOWEVER, if I do an 'echo  
$FILENAME_LIST' for debugging purposes in both cases, I get exactly  
the SAME OUTPUT IN BOTH CASES. I.e. though this 'echo  
$FILENAME_LIST' command displays

FILE1 FILE2 FILE3

in both cases without ANY difference, in one case 'cat  
$FILENAME_LIST' won't work and in the other case it will.



Can somebody please explain me what's going on?
And can you tell me if I REALLY have to use this strange patch from  
above, or if there's a "regular" solution to my problem?

Thank you VERY much for any insight!


                Bye
                        Uli

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Uli Zappe               E-Mail: uli@tallowcross.uni-frankfurt.de
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