Shell Programming and Scripting

Originally Posted by bakunin

This is the culprit. The "eval" sends the line through the evaluation process a second time, but the first time it has already eaten away your quotation and this second time the newline terminates the line. You have to escape the quotation to protect it for the correct evaluation pass to interpret it.

Notice the difference between:

Code:

echo "abc"                # evaluated once, but the "" are missing in the output
echo "\"abc\""            # evaluated once, the inner "" are there, without escaping
eval echo "\"abc\""       # second evaluation ate the second pair of ""
eval echo "\\"abc\\""     # two evaluations need two-time escaped quoations

I hope this helps.

bakunin