C) The whole idea of a whole *class* of metacharacters (space, slash, backslash, backquote, semicolon, etc.) is an idiotic *Unix* practice.
It's only in interactive shells.
And it's still stupid.
On the original topic of blanks, what other way is there to make sure that arguments are given to a program appropriately ? Currently the shell takes every space separated word to build up argv[]. You would have to override any assumption that is made with some sort of escape mechanism. And then have to escape the escape. EVEN IN programatic languages (" & ' have to be escaped in C/C++. Not in perl if you use qq() or q(). But perl is superior in SO many ways :) and then the \ has to be escaped !
But after that, we can argue all through history about the usefulness of shells and their job control, file handling, simple programming language etc.
The whole idea that quote doesn't shut down the metaness of *every* character except quote is just a stupid design decision from the Bourne shell days propagated 20 years into the future.
quote, or double-quote ?
Pick one. Just make it work.
single-quote works as you desired every time
In fact, I don't think you CAN escape a single-quote once you are already in a single-quoted string. You have to get out first. In this respect, shell just sees nothing else until it sees that ' !
<snip>
The argument is similar to the one for a build system. A build system should be a real programming language with some syntactical/ library helper functions to make commonly used operations convenient. Anything less eventually requires people to tie themselves in knots to work around the problems (see Ant, the Java build system, for example).
of good or bad behavior ?
I don't do Java. I don't do any programming these days that I can't get instant gratification out of (no compiling, no linking nothing !)
It's perl for me !
-- Michael O'Keefe | [EMAIL PROTECTED] Live on and Ride a 03 BMW F650GSDakar| [EMAIL PROTECTED] / | I like less more or less less than |Work:+1 858 845 3514 / | more. UNIX-live it,love it,fork() it |Fax :+1 858 845 2652 /_p_| My views are MINE ALONE, blah, blah, |Home:+1 760 788 1296 \`O'| blah, yackety yack - don't come back |Fax :+1 858 _/_\|_,
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