Question

I wrote a little script that check something, and i want a command to be executed from within the script if the test was successfull. And i don’t want to hardcode the command, but give it as argument to it like a callback script.

The command I testing with is /usr/bin/xmessage -buttons "button a","button b" some text to test. Running it within a terminal standalone works fine, no quotation marks needed for the last text.

The script looks like this:

#!/bin/bash
echo "$1"
$1

But when running /path/to/script.bash '/usr/bin/xmessage -buttons "button a","button b" some text to test' it looks like this, though the echo looks right.

When using "$1" instead of $1 it complains it couldn’t find the file. Anyone got ideas how to fix the behavior with the space?

Answer 1

I suggest you write the script like this:

#!/bin/bash
echo ${1+"$@"}
${1+"$@"}

And call it like this:

/path/to/script.bash /usr/bin/xmessage -buttons "button a","button b" some text to test