Wow, quoting confusion: unix.stackexchange.com/questions/393906/…

I think he does need to escape quotes around the final argument

well no

No

¯_(ツ)_/¯

The last argument shuld be a string ok, but it has a space, so he quotes it.

END of story

He should not try to include the quotes in the value of the last argument.

He only needs to protect the string from word splitting in the shell.

And he's done that already.

@Kusalananda perhaps he really wants some quotes within the argument?

We don't know what command he's using or waht that command expects.

he posted the command

should be: robocfg vlan 100 ports "1 5t"

Looks ordinary to me.

He also says: The last argument is a literal string and must be quoted

That's a common thing to do with a string that contains a space.

yea but as you said it's already quoted

Yes, so I think he's reading far too muchinto somethig he's reading somewhere, or something

Yea he just commented again. Looks like his command was failing, not that he was failing to properly form it

@Jesse_b I didn't read all the comments, some special enough program might want quotes within nth argument

How can something as simple as a quoting a string cause so much confusion?

it confused me so I can't talk

Same thing here, but older question: unix.stackexchange.com/questions/342931/…

Again, the OP is talking about "the output"

There is no output

... unless you run under set -x

Yea I read through that. My issue is that I was (for some unknown reason) thinking the command was being passed somewhere before being executed, but as you point out it was being executed right there within the for loop as it was quoted.

In which case the quotes appears to be removed in the tracing output

@Kusalananda I can't imagine why those escape backslashes ended up there. Too bad this time wasn't trying to get them :\

but they aren,t

@sebasth Sorry, you lost me there... Escaped backslashes you say?

@Kusalananda I mean, why did he type those quotes with backslashes (which is why those quotes ended up to his program)

@Kusalananda nvm, I thought he didn't want those quotes, instead it looks like he thought he wanted them

Because, as with the most recent question, the OP is far to concerned with getting the quotes to show up in the set -x trace.

\\"\\'\\"?

These people need to quote an argument because it contains things that needs to be quoted (from the shell), but the quotes themselves should not be part of the argument.

How is this difficult?

@Kusalananda somehow thinking its the program which requires those quotes and not the shell

I've never ever seen a utility that requires quotes.

@Kusalananda you can always write one!

Don't tempt me!

@Kusalananda special argument formats to match special requirements by special people

This got me really riled up. Darn, and I was getting ready for bed too. Now I won't be able to sleep for a few hours.

Now I need to come up with the most obnoxious question about quoting to stoke the flames

@Jesse_b You could try a "how do I access the value of a variable whose name is in another variable" question.

Those are fun.

(such utility could also require supplying integer arguments in a byte, to be directly casted to int in the c code naturally)

Lol naw I'm tired of you guys giving me crap for asking stupid questions >.>

@Jesse_b Stupid questions are good. It's people that do not learn that is the problem.

@Jesse_b Honestly, and this is important: Stupid questions are good. There can be no worse thing than to be stuck with a problem that you know ought to be silly easy, but isn't. Ask the question and get past it. But learn from it, or you'll soon wear down even the best teachers.

One of things I really like about CL is sane syntax. Accomplished by throwing away most of the syntax. There's a lesson in there somewhere...

Sadly I can't say the same about the shell everyone here seems to love so much.

Agreed. Some of y'all (not you specifically) are pretty hard on the easy questions though. I see it though, things that are in the first few pages of the bash manual probably shouldn't need to be asked, etc. However when I first came here I didn't even know what bash was and to try and read a *nix manual would have been very intimidating.

The more understanding of the basics I get the more I'm able to understand from technical documents.

@Jesse_b Unix documentation can be hard to read. It's not really intended for beginners. Most of it, anyway.

Traditionally, it makes a lot of assumptions of the reader.

There still are plenty of questions which can be answered by quoting the first few lines from the man page

Some people wants to learn, other just want us to write their code.

Also, Unix documentation doesn't really have a culture of examples. Though the GNU documentation is an honorable exception.

@Kusalananda or homework

The zip man page.

I think that's one of good things the GNU project has done. Improve expectations of documentation.

The zip man page is horrible.

@Kusalananda Specially horrible?

Yes, it goes on and on about you can do this and you can do that...

With examples and all sorts.

It makes it really difficult to actually locate useful info.

You don't like the examples?

I generally do.

Of course, it's possible to have too much of a good thing.

I just want to know what a flag does or the general semantics of something

is there a way to hire people from serverfault?

Sure, but sometimes examples provide concreteness, and can help to dispel misunderstandings.

@Dawg Hire them?

yes

@FaheemMitha I agree and love examples.

Sometimes people have stuff posted on SE Careers.

@FaheemMitha There is a synopsis, it lays out the semantics of the command. That's enough.

@Dawg see if they have contact details in profile information and make an offer?

@Dawg Including contact info, presumably.

@Kusalananda Ah, Berkeley purism. :-)

Thanks

@Kusalananda Just kidding.

It's just I might need a server admin for a longer time frame

People on Serverfault seem to understand their business

Can't find a freelancer who is appropriate for the task

@FaheemMitha If you start adding examples, you have to cover all cases.

There's also a freelancing Stack Exchange.

@Kusalananda Not necessarily. I think the rsync man page does a good job, for example.

Well, that's another one.

@Kusalananda hmm?

@Kusalananda plenty man pages also include a separate EXAMPLES section with usually a few common use cases, while leaving such examples out from other sections

Too chatty it is.

@FaheemMitha lol you're just going to keep him awake and stressing about the rsync man page now

Yes, it makes sense to have a separate examples section.

@Jesse_b You have no idea

@Jesse_b Mea Culpa.

:)

@Kusalananda Think soothing thoughts.

00:04 here now.

If you need an example of thinking soothing thoughts let us know.

Drink tea with honey or something.

Saturday tomorrow though.

@Kusalananda sunday, if today refers to "now"

You could listen to Bach. I find he soothes me when I'm feeling stressed.

I'll leave you with whatever you're getting up to.

Whatever has been said, I hope I did not offend.

Particularly the vocal music. Cantatas and so forth.

@Kusalananda You're the soul of gentility.

@Kusalananda Nope...you wont convince me to dislike examples!

:-)

I regularly have conflicts with people about examples in documentation.

The R people are terrible about it, for example.

Well, it's been a while since I used R.

They have a section with examples, nominally, but never bother to explain any of it! Which is cruel.

@sebasth I see your rep is going ZOOM. Are you planning on sticking around?

It is?

@sebasth Relatively speaking, yes.

@FaheemMitha and possibly, depends on what kinds of questions are also being asked

@sebasth Hmm.

We get a lot of shell questions here. And helpdesk stuff. HELP my computer doesn't work.

Not the most exciting stuff.

exactly

But much of the net isn't much better. And some of it is worse.

but there are occasional excellent answers expanded on some rather trivial questions too

@sebasth Agreed.

@sebasth Consider answering the "getting to know you" on Meta. Though hardly anyone does.

@FaheemMitha yeah, worse definitely, perhaps a bit less awfulness here due malicious/nasty answers do eventually disappear

@FaheemMitha I don't really have much interesting to say, some might even describe me a bit boring

@sebasth None of us are that exciting.

I stayed up past my bedtime last night...

Well, there are also those questions really requiring some psychic abilities to decipher OPs message; I suppose it isn't one of those skills one acquire by time

@sebasth It isn't. You're supposed to ask if things are not clear. That's what I do, anyway.

Often I don't get a reply.

@sebasth Yea well it's usually not smart to assume. I consider myself really good at assuming and it still makes me look like a fool more than half the time :p

Often the poster has no idea what he/she is doing. Which can make things difficult.

I guess there are a lot of beginners and non-technical people trying Linux these days.

@FaheemMitha Yes I also wonder about those people that never reply. I wonder if they even see the answers people provide. :(

Though even more on AU, probably.

@Jesse_b Yes, it's strange not to reply to people trying to help you for free.

Though I admit I often don't respond to updates to bug reports. Though those tend to happen after months. Or years.

However some problems only occur in some peculiar corner cases/unusual configurations (without being a bug/or some of those bugs that developers declared wontfix), about which is nice to have some mention somewhere which can be found with google

To make a distinction to those tech-support questions which would be solved by reading the documentation provided

Reminds me of, has anyone here used pam_groups with gnome3 desktop (on Linux) successfully?