You're swimming upstream. Don't do that. Use the system in accordance with its design.
Parsing command lines based on white-space separators fundamentally entails the need for escaping or quoting when those separator characters are to be included in the arguments and not used to separate them.
At 22:09 2002-12-03, James Shaw wrote:
Hi everyone,No, No and Yes. Just leave the spaces in the variable and command completion will insert the necessary escapes when expanding it. If the variable references is already inside a double-quote (even if it's not yet closed on the right), then command completion will not insert the backslashes.
I have been using cygwin for several months, and there is something that I haven't been able to figure out how to do: effectively use spaces in bash environment variables.
I realize this is basically a bash question and isn't Cygwin specific, but I'm sure more Cygwin users have to deal with spaces in bash than the typical bash user.
What I want to do is define an environment
variable so I can easily cd or ls. E.g.
% PF="/cygdrive/c/Program Files"
% cd $PF
% ls $PF/Games
% ls $PF/G<tab completion!>
The above is close, I can
% cd "$PF"; ls "$PF"/Games; and even
ls "$PF"/G<tab> however, the quotes are clunky.
My kludge to avoid the quotes is:
% PF2="/cygdrive/c/Program?Files"
which allows cd $PF; ls $PF/Games,
but stops bash in its tracks on tab completion.
Since I would find this very handy, I've spent some time on trying to make this work. I've tried various quoting schemes, but with no luck.
So, I ask the list:
Can you define $PF so that cd $PF;
ls $PF/Games; and ls $PF/G<tab> all work???
I usually like to puzzle these out for myself, but in this case, I'm stumped.Thanks for your help, James
Randall Schulz
Mountain View, CA USA
--
Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Bug reporting: http://cygwin.com/bugs.html
Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/