🚀 go-pugleaf

>In article <6990@sugar.hackercorp.com> peter@sugar.hackercorp.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
>In article <1990Nov4.150403.28982@cbnewsc.att.com> gregg@cbnewsc.att.com (gregg.g.wonderly) writes:
>> I find the UN*X shells' quoting conventions to be quite adequate at
>> avoiding the need to require a SPACE anywhere.  If you want something which
>> contains meta characters to become part of a parameter-word, you quote it.
>
>The problem is that in this case you have two sets of metacharacters
>conflicting at the shell level. Think about the following:
>
>	list lformat=%s #?.c|#?.h | zoo ...
>
>Now if you quote that:
>
>	list lformat=%s "#?.c|#?.h" | zoo ...
>
>How does list know whether to expand it or not? What if you're using a shell
>that does expansion?

A Unix shell would pipe the first example as:
list lformat=%s #?.c (pipe) #?.h (pipe) zoo

and the second as:
list lformat=%s "#?.c|#?.h" (pipe) zoo

Generally, the shell knows about the quoting metacharacter, and it takes precedence over
the other metacharacters.  The backslash is always a single character quote, the
quotation mark is always a quotation delimiter unless preceded by a backslash, and
other characters are not considered metacharacters when quoted (although I believe some
metacharacters for some shells are always metacharacters unless quoted with the 
backslash).
--
bruce@zuhause.mn.org