04-06-2013
Quote:
Originally Posted by
wisecracker
The terminal IS interactive, so why not experiment with it first!
Your sample session is unrelated to the OP's problem because it does not utilize the same type of command substitution redirection and (more importantly) none of your variables contain both a space and a pattern matching wildcard.
A space causes field splitting to generate multiple tokens from a single token (this is the source of the "ambiguous redirect" error). Pathname wildcards are expanded after field splitting. Double quoting disables both of these expansions. So ,while it protects against field splitting, it prevents pathname expansion wildcards from doing their job.
Because field splitting occurs before pathname expansion, spaces that appear as a result of wildcard expansion (as in your example) are never problem (unless eval is used to run through the parser a second time).
Regards,
Alister
Last edited by alister; 04-06-2013 at 08:45 AM..
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LEARN ABOUT LINUX
wordexp
WORDEXP(3) Linux Programmer's Manual WORDEXP(3)
NAME
wordexp, wordfree - perform word expansion like a posix-shell
SYNOPSIS
#include <wordexp.h>
int wordexp(const char *s, wordexp_t *p, int flags);
void wordfree(wordexp_t *p);
Feature Test Macro Requirements for glibc (see feature_test_macros(7)):
wordexp(), wordfree(): _XOPEN_SOURCE
DESCRIPTION
The function wordexp() performs a shell-like expansion of the string s and returns the result in the structure pointed to by p. The data
type wordexp_t is a structure that at least has the fields we_wordc, we_wordv, and we_offs. The field we_wordc is a size_t that gives the
number of words in the expansion of s. The field we_wordv is a char ** that points to the array of words found. The field we_offs of type
size_t is sometimes (depending on flags, see below) used to indicate the number of initial elements in the we_wordv array that should be
filled with NULLs.
The function wordfree() frees the allocated memory again. More precisely, it does not free its argument, but it frees the array we_wordv
and the strings that points to.
The string argument
Since the expansion is the same as the expansion by the shell (see sh(1)) of the parameters to a command, the string s must not contain
characters that would be illegal in shell command parameters. In particular, there must not be any unescaped newline or |, &, ;, <, >, (,
), {, } characters outside a command substitution or parameter substitution context.
If the argument s contains a word that starts with an unquoted comment character #, then it is unspecified whether that word and all fol-
lowing words are ignored, or the # is treated as a non-comment character.
The expansion
The expansion done consists of the following stages: tilde expansion (replacing ~user by user's home directory), variable substitution
(replacing $FOO by the value of the environment variable FOO), command substitution (replacing $(command) or `command` by the output of
command), arithmetic expansion, field splitting, wildcard expansion, quote removal.
The result of expansion of special parameters ($@, $*, $#, $?, $-, $$, $!, $0) is unspecified.
Field splitting is done using the environment variable $IFS. If it is not set, the field separators are space, tab and newline.
The output array
The array we_wordv contains the words found, followed by a NULL.
The flags argument
The flag argument is a bitwise inclusive OR of the following values:
WRDE_APPEND
Append the words found to the array resulting from a previous call.
WRDE_DOOFFS
Insert we_offs initial NULLs in the array we_wordv. (These are not counted in the returned we_wordc.)
WRDE_NOCMD
Don't do command substitution.
WRDE_REUSE
The argument p resulted from a previous call to wordexp(), and wordfree() was not called. Reuse the allocated storage.
WRDE_SHOWERR
Normally during command substitution stderr is redirected to /dev/null. This flag specifies that stderr is not to be redirected.
WRDE_UNDEF
Consider it an error if an undefined shell variable is expanded.
RETURN VALUE
In case of success 0 is returned. In case of error one of the following five values is returned.
WRDE_BADCHAR
Illegal occurrence of newline or one of |, &, ;, <, >, (, ), {, }.
WRDE_BADVAL
An undefined shell variable was referenced, and the WRDE_UNDEF flag told us to consider this an error.
WRDE_CMDSUB
Command substitution occurred, and the WRDE_NOCMD flag told us to consider this an error.
WRDE_NOSPACE
Out of memory.
WRDE_SYNTAX
Shell syntax error, such as unbalanced parentheses or unmatched quotes.
VERSIONS
wordexp() and wordfree() are provided in glibc since version 2.1.
CONFORMING TO
POSIX.1-2001.
EXAMPLE
The output of the following example program is approximately that of "ls [a-c]*.c".
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <wordexp.h>
int
main(int argc, char **argv)
{
wordexp_t p;
char **w;
int i;
wordexp("[a-c]*.c", &p, 0);
w = p.we_wordv;
for (i = 0; i < p.we_wordc; i++)
printf("%s
", w[i]);
wordfree(&p);
exit(EXIT_SUCCESS);
}
SEE ALSO
fnmatch(3), glob(3)
COLOPHON
This page is part of release 3.27 of the Linux man-pages project. A description of the project, and information about reporting bugs, can
be found at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.
2008-07-14 WORDEXP(3)