Question

I need my script to be able to accept arguments with space characters. If, for example, I have a script as follows:

for SOME_VAR in $@
do
    echo "$SOME_VAR"
    cd "$SOME_VAR"
done;

If I pass arguments to the script (assuming it is called foo.sh)

sh foo.sh "Hello world"

I am expecting the script to print Hello world and change the directory to Hello world. But I get this error message instead:

hello
cd: 5: can't cd to hello
world
cd: 5: can't cd to world

How exactly do I pass an argument with a space character to a command in a shell script?

Answer 1

You must wrap the $@ in quotes, too: "$@"

This tells the shell to ignore spaces in the arguments; it doesn’t turn all arguments into a very long string.