Thanks for responding.

I think you're misunderstanding what I'm trying to do.

First lets start with this:

Code:

me@server dir $ls
file1  file2  file3  file4
me@server dir $echo '*'
*
me@server dir $echo *
file1 file2 file3 file4
me@server dir $temp='*'
me@server dir $echo $temp
file1 file2 file3 file4
a7me@server dir $echo "$temp"
*
me@server dir $

I don't see how it's too little too late. It's doing exactly what the shell should do. Single quotes don't expand anything and double quotes allow expansion. If you set a variable to '*' then it literally equals *, however if instead you set it to just * then glob comes into play and you get an array containing all of the files/directories in your current directory.

I'm currectly writing a program to do this I did post all the code I had in the first post. Which works almost as it should. If you give it a file that is newline seperated such as:

Code:

cmd1 opt1 opt2 opt3 opt'4 opt5
cmd2 opt1 opt2 opt3 'opt4 opt5
cmd3 opt1 opt2 opt3 opt4' opt5
cmd4 opt'1 'opt2 opt3' opt4' opt5

It currently loops through and prints the following (I'm only going to show the last line):

Code:

'cmd4'
'opt'\1'
''\opt2'
'opt3'\'
'opt4'\'
'opt5'
new cmd

So for the argument opt4' I expect to see 'opt4'\'''. In this case I'm getting 'opt4'\' which means the part that replacess all occurences of ' with '\'' isn't working correctly. It also isn't consistent as for arg 2 ' is replaced with just '\

I think the code makes it clear that I'm simply replacing all occurences of ' with '\'' and then appending ' to the begining and end of each string/arg. This because everything in between the two single quotes will not be expanded and will be read literally. However the shell isn't capaple of allowing me to escape a ' in the middle of a single quoted string. (can't do: 'don't' can do 'don'\''t')

The final version would of course execute command and pass the args, however I want to see what is going to the command before I call it so I can verify if it's working which is why it currently just prints the args line per line.