Shell Programming and Scripting

so i'm havin a bit of a issue getting set to recognize a value with spaces as a variable.


this is what i'm doing:

Code:

VAR="1 2 4 11 'dogs mouse cars' 50 19 'noise toys' "

set -- ${VAR}

When i issue a command such as the one below:

Code:

echo $5  or  echo "${5}"

i get

Code:

dog

when i should really be getting:

Code:

'dogs mouse cars'

or if i issue

Code:

echo $8 or echo "${8}"

i should get:

Code:

'noise toys'

but instead, i get:

Code:

noise

OS: Linux RedHat, Ubuntu, AIX, HPUX, SunOS

Can't explain why, but this works right. There may be a shopt <option> to change the variable expansion rule??

Code:

set 1 2 4 11 "dogs mouse cars" 50 19 "noise toys"

The reason your code doesn't work is because quotes aren't processed when variables are expanded. With your code, the command: echo $5 should have produced 'dogs; not dog.

With shells that support arrays, you could also try:

Code:

VARS=(1 2 4 11 'dogs mouse cars' 50 19 "noise toys")
set -- "${VARS[@]}"
printf '$5 is "%s"\n$8 is "%s"\n' "$5" "$8"

which with recent versions of bash and ksh produces:

Code:

$5 is "dogs mouse cars"
$8 is "noise toys"

Note that the quotes used when setting the elements of the array are not included in the array element; they disappear when the shell performs quote processing to group the words together in the 5th and 8th elements of the array.