Bob Friesenhahn <bfriesen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> > The POSIX-style shell tosses the double quotes at first point of use. When a variable reference is itself "..." quoted, like "$variable", a POSIX shell does NOT toss the double-quotes. When it's unquoted, a POSIX shell *does* toss the double-quotes. I am *counting* on that behavior to make this scheme work. This works out in makefiles at least. Going back to my examples in a makefile: SBCL =/cygdrive/c/"Program Files/Steel Bank Common Lisp/1.2.6/sbcl" EGREP = /usr/bin/grep -E Typically programs are invoked in a makefile as $(NAME), and this 'just works' in the proposed convention: dostuff: $(SBCL) < x.src > x.dest $(EGREP) pattern y.src >> x.dest > Arguments must be escaped varying amounts of times to survive a given > data path, and the data path may not be a fixed one. Many shell programmers, out of habit, always reference shell variables as "$variable_name" instead of $variable_name, and then quoting survives just fine. It might not be hard to fix up the remaining ones (it is a good habit anyway). There might need to be a way to vary how replacements are done (e.g., a Makefile would have the quoting scheme, while a #include file would not). But the fundamental problem is that there's no way to distinguish the different uses of spaces; once there's an input and storage convention, you can then decide how to best output them. --- David A. Wheeler _______________________________________________ Autoconf mailing list Autoconf@xxxxxxx https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/autoconf
