Awesome, thanks for the expert response!

I vote for

eval "$1=\$5"

Jacob

On Fri, 30 Apr 2021 at 02:51, Stephane Chazelas <stephane@chazelas.org>
wrote:

> 2021-04-29 19:53:52 -0400, Jacob Menke:
> [...]
> > regexp-replace str 'a' 'z' && echo $str
> >
> > Actual Output:
> > (eval):1: bzd not found
> >
> > Expected:
> > x :=bzd
> [...]
>
> One might argue there's a problem with the (q) parameter
> expansion flag, it escapes leading =s but not the =s that follow
> : even though they're special there in assignments.
>
> $ echo a=x:=y
> a=x:=y
> $ a=x:=y
> zsh: y not found
>
> BTW, zsh is the only shell where ~ is expanded in:
>
> $ zsh -c 'a=a\:~; echo $a'
> a:/home/chazelas
>
> [...]
> > One way to fix:
> > 41: eval ${1}=${(qqq)5}
>
> The safest quoting operator is the (qq) one. I wouldn't use any
> other for things to be reinput to the shell.
>
> See
>
> https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/379181/escape-a-variable-for-use-as-content-of-another-script/600214#600214
> for details on that.
>
> In particular qqq uses double quotes inside which \ and ` are
> still special and those characters also appear in the encoding
> of some other characters in some locales.
>
> But here, the best thing to do is to not expose the parser to
> the contents of $5 by doing:
>
> eval "$1=\$5"
>
> (which tells the shell to evaluate varname=$5)
>
> You need to expand $1 here which contains the variable name.
>
> Note that as already noted at
> https://www.zsh.org/mla/workers/2019/msg01113.html
> whether you use that or
>
> : ${(P)1::="$5"}
>
> You'll still have a command injection vulnerability if $1 is not
> guaranteed to be a variable name.
>
> --
> Stephane
>