Question

I have a string that contains something like this:

apple orange pear grapes

And I have a command that works like this:

eat food [additionalFood [additionalFood [additionalFood...]]

If I do eat $s, then it will treat the whole string as one big food. How can I break up the string into passable arguments?

Answer 1

It shouldn’t treat that as one big string. Example:

test.sh

#! /bin/bash
for stuff; do
    echo "XXX: $stuff"
done

Command-line

chmod +x test.sh
s="apple orange pear grapes"
./test.sh $s

Output

XXX: apple
XXX: orange
XXX: pear
XXX: grapes

If this isn’t working for you, it’s possible your IFS variable is set to a non-default value.