Question

I have this problem, I have two (bourne) shell scripts, ony with subroutines, the other with the main program.

The problem lies in the argument-passing.

In my subroutine script I have this:


test()
{
echo "$1"
}


When called from the main program like this:


test "foo bar"


The result of the echo is ‘foo bar’ (note the single quotes)
When I modify my test to this:


test()
{
FOOBAR="foo bar";
echo "$FOOBAR"
}


Then the result does not contain quotes.

Then subroutinescript is sourced like this:


. testroutines.sh


Using sh -x I see the variable that is passed seems to be quoted with single quotes?

What am I missing?

Answer 1

It seems to have to do with the IFS, it was incorrectly set. It didn’t contain a space.