A shell assignment is a single word, with no space after the equal sign. So what you wrote assigns an empty value to thefile; furthermore, since the assignment is grouped with a command, it makes thefile an environment variable and the assignment is local to that particular command, i.e. only the...

Consider the following code: foo () { echo $* } bar () { echo $@ } foo 1 2 3 4 bar 1 2 3 4 It outputs: 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 I am using Ksh88, but I am interested in other common shells as well. If you happen to know any particularity for specific shells, please do mention them...

Or, an introductory guide to robust filename handling and other string passing in shell scripts. I wrote a shell script which works well most of the time. But it chokes on some inputs (e.g. on some file names). I encountered a problem such as the following: I have a file name containing a spa...