It's very traditional to get a shell when you do a shell login, but that's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

sudo does not perform an old-fashioned tty LOGIN process and does not behave like that:

Code:

sudo 'echo $HOSTNAME'

sudo:  echo $HOSTNAME: command not found

Further, most common "command modifying" utilities like nice, nohup, xargs, env etc don't. The only single exception I can think of off-hand is 'watch'.

Furthermore, permitting expansion to happen in the same shell is asking for trouble. Expansion inside ssh won't cause ssh itself to blow up from syntax errors... Kind of bad form. I'd want to put it in an external shell at the very least.

That problem would be more easily solved with standard split I think.

Why not put tr before linesplit? I see what you're getting at, but it'd be simple enough to put it in an awk command.

The awk command suggested by MadeInGermany would mess up when re-parsed unless you re-quote and escape it extravagantly.

It substitutes inside individual tokens instead of cramming into one string, substituting, and splitting back apart. This preserves splitting.