In the last episode (Jul 30), Peter Stephenson said:
> Hrvoje Niksic wrote:
> > I suggest modifying the zsh `-x' output to quote its arguments the
> > way Bash does.  What do the others think?
> 
> This would be nice, but it's not a trivial change.  The xtrace output
> is done at the last minute after quoting information has been
> stripped.  This is deliberate, in order to output exactly what is
> being evaluated after all substitutions, which is the information you
> can't get any other way.  This is at odds with showing all the
> quotes.  It's possible there's some compromise position which would
> show a lot of everything --- the quotes get stripped at quite a late
> stage.  However, there's no way of doing it perfectly without a great
> deal of work --- consider expansions like "$@".

I think all bash does is check each argument for spaces, single-quotes,
or backslashes, and then quotes and escapes that argument.  It doesn't
care what quoting the user had on the commandline:

$ echo one\ two 'one two' "one two"
+ echo 'one two' 'one two' 'one two'

I did a quick hack that replaced a bunch of fprintf/zputs with
quotedzputs, and it seems to work fine.  It ends up quoting "one'two"
as 'one'\''two' for some reason, single-quoting "one",
backslash-escaping "'", and single-quoting "two".  Weird, but valid.
This is my first zsh hack, and I'm probably doing everything wrong, but
it shows that it's really not difficult.  Even "$@" works.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson@allantgroup.com