Question

I am having some issues with word-splitting in bash variable expansion. I want to be able to store an argument list in a variable and run it, but any quoted multiword arguments aren’t evaluating how I expected them to.

I’ll explain my problem with an example. Lets say I had a function decho that printed each positional parameter on it’s own line:

#!/bin/bash -u while [ $# -gt 0 ]; do   echo $1   shift done 

Ok, if I go decho a b 'c d' I get:

[~]$ decho a b 'c d' a b c d 

Which is what I expect and want. But on the other hand if I get the arguments list from a variable I get this:

[~]$ args='a b 'c d'' [~]$ decho $args a b 'c d' 

Which is not what I want. I can go:

[~]$ echo decho $args | bash a b c d 

But that seems a little clunky. Is there a better way to make the expansion of $args in decho $args be word-split the way I expected?

Answer 1

You can use:

eval decho $args