Re: protect spaces and/or globs

[Ray Andrews <rayandrews@eastlink.ca>]

On 2021-02-09 5:52 p.m., Greg Klanderman wrote:

     It works Greg, but it misses the crux of my problem which is that 
all my wrappers run everything thru 'eval'
as below (simplified from your original):

grep_wrapper ()
{
   grepargs=()
   sstring=
   while [[ $# -gt 0 ]] ; do
     arg="$1"
     shift
       grepargs+=( "$arg" )                            # This is what 
Peter was saying.
   done
#  grep --color=always -i -- "${grepargs[@]}"         # Works fine but ...
   sstring="grep --color=always -i -- ${grepargs[@]}"  # I need to save 
to a scalar ...
   print -rS "$sstring"                                # Write to 
history ...
   eval "$sstring"                                     # And 'eval'.

   print -r "\n$sstring"
}

9 /aWorking/Zsh/Source/Wk 4 $ . test; grep_wrapper 'on the current' 
'i,2,light edit' 'i,1,old stable'
grep: the: No such file or directory
grep: current: No such file or directory
grep: i,2,light: No such file or directory
grep: edit: No such file or directory
grep: i,1,old: No such file or directory
grep: stable: No such file or directory

grep --color=always -i -- on the current i,2,light edit i,1,old stable

     ... as before the quotes are stripped if I do it my way.  But as I 
discovered last night:

9 /aWorking/Zsh/Source/Wk 4 $ . test; grep_wrapper "'on the current' 
'i,2,light edit' 'i,1,old stable'"
i,2,light edit:Find any command named 'mtr*' on the current path.
i,1,old stable:Find any command named 'mtr*' on the current path.

grep --color=always -i -- 'on the current' 'i,2,light edit' 'i,1,old stable'

     ... by simply double quoting the argument string, the single quotes 
are preserved and 'eval' works.

She is NOT being unreasonable.   Just do it her way and everything will 
be fine.
A lesson for life.