Escaping spaces in arguments to shell script

Derek Atkins warlord at MIT.EDU
Wed Apr 26 13:02:44 EDT 2006


Hi,

Quoting Steven Erat <stevenerat at yahoo.com>:

> Would someone kindly suggest the solution to passing input parameters to a
> shell script where the arguments may contain spaces?

Put quotes around it...

> [auser at localhost ~]$ cat makeLink.sh
> #!/bin/sh
> echo First arg is: $1, Second arg is $2
> /bin/ln -s $1 $2

Change this to:

  /bin/ln -s "$1" "$2"

Although that will probably have problems if you have embedded quotes
in your filenames.

-derek
-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available




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