Sigh.  Someday maybe I'll decide not to answer email in the middle of the 
night when I've been taking decongestants.

On Mon, 16 Aug 2004, Aaron Davies wrote:

> On Monday, August 16, 2004, at 03:41 AM, Bart Schaefer wrote:
> 
> > What happens when one of the arguments of the command is a quoted word
> > containing spaces?
[...]
> >   sleep 30 &
> >   runcommandonpidof sleep print -l "this should be on one line"
> > 
> > (and try it in a non-zsh shell, where word splitting applies; no 
> > cheating by letting zsh preserve the quoting for you, you asked for 
> > portability).
> 
> What is "print"?

As has been pointed out by Raśl, I've been telling you to avoid zsh while 
giving an example that uses a zsh builtin.

> toall sleep echo "this is one line"
> 
> produces
> 
> this is one line 19980
> 
> whether or not $@ is in quotes.

Try this one:

	toall sleep echo "this has          ten spaces"

With $@, you should get

	this has ten spaces 19980

Whereas "$@" should give

	this has          ten spaces 19980

On Mon, 16 Aug 2004, Aaron Davies wrote:

> I'm running this under Bourne sh, as I mentioned in my original request.

And I should have remembered, as Dan Nelson mentioned, that $pipestatus is
only available in bash and zsh and therefore not portable.