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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Passing space separated value to a function - error Post 302357636 by bakunin on Wednesday 30th of September 2009 09:32:27 AM
Old 09-30-2009
The reason is that <space> is a special character to the shell: it is the "field separator". If you feed a command (and a shell function in this regard is similar to a command) some arguments they get plucked from the commandline one by one and the shell supposes them to be separated by blanks:

Code:
command arg1 arg2 arg3

"command" will suppose "arg1" to be the first argument, "arg2" to be the second, and so on. If it takes only 2 arguments it will simply ignore the rest . this is what has happened to your other names.

What to do if you want to pass an argument which contains space characters? This is where quoting comes in.

Code:
command "arg1 arg2" arg3

Now "command" will suppose "arg1 arg2" to be the first argument and "arg3" to be the second.

No let us examine your script: with the line

Code:
namesCheck $names

you feed the function namesCheck 3 arguments, which it gladly receives. The first line in namesCheck() is

Code:
myname=$1

which means: take the first argument and store it in $myname. Exactly this is what the shell does - it stores the first argument passed - the first name - into $myname.

To solve this problem you have two possibilities: either pass all the names as one argument, then you could use the for-loop like you did. For this you will have to surround $names by double quotes when you call namesCheck():

Code:
nameCheck "$names"

Or you could pass the names as separate arguments, but then the function has to have provisions to deal with multiple arguments, like pravin27 mentioned.

I hope this helps.

bakunin
 

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RLAM(1) 						      General Commands Manual							   RLAM(1)

NAME
rlam - laminate records from multiple files SYNOPSIS
rlam [ -tS ][ -u ][ -iaN | -ifN | -idN | -iiN | -iwN | -ibN ] input1 input2 .. DESCRIPTION
Rlam simply joins records (or lines) from multiple inputs, separating them with the given string (TAB by default). Different separators may be given for different files by specifying additional -t options in between each file name. Note that there is no space between this option and its argument. If none of the input files uses an ASCII separator, then no end-of-line character will be printed, either. An input is either a stream or a command. Commands are given in quotes, and begin with an exclamantion point ('!'). If the inputs do not have the same number of lines, then shorter files will stop contributing to the output as they run out. The -ia option may be used to specify ASCII input (the default), or the -if option may be used to indicated binary IEEE 32-bit floats on input. Similarly, the -id and -ii options may be used to indicate binary 64-bit doubles or integer words, respectively. The -iw option specifies 2-byte short words, and the -ib option specifies bytes. If a number is immediately follows any of these options, then it indi- cates that multiple such values are expected for each record. For example, -if3 indicates three floats per input record for the next named input. In the case of the -ia option, no number indicates one line per input record, and numbers greater than zero indicate that many characters exactly per record. For binary input formts, no number implies one value per record. For anything other than EOL-separated input, the default tab separator is reset to the empty string. A hyphen ('-') by itself can be used to indicate the standard input, and may appear multiple times. The -u option forces output after each record (i.e., one run through inputs). EXAMPLE
To join files output1 and output2, separated by a comma: rlam -t, output1 output2 To join a file with line numbers (starting at 0) and its reverse: cnt `wc -l < lam.c` | rlam - -t: lam.c -t '!tail -r lam.c' To join four data files, each having three doubles per record: rlam -id3 file1.dbl file2.dbl file3.dbl file4.dbl > combined.dbl AUTHOR
Greg Ward SEE ALSO
cnt(1), histo(1), neaten(1), rcalc(1), tabfunc(1), total(1) RADIANCE
7/8/97 RLAM(1)
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