CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bashshellsh
Alexander Tumin
Alexander Tumin

Reputation: 1591

Splitting a string to tokens according to shell parameter rules without eval

I have a string like

$ str="abc 'e f g' hij"

and i wish to get whole e f g part of it. In other words, i wish to tokenize the string according to shell parameter rules.

Currently, i am doing that as

$ str="abc 'e f g' hij"; (eval "set -- $str"; echo $2)

but this is totally unsafe if a single * gets outside of '-ticks.

Any better solutions?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 223

Answers (1)

chepner
chepner

Reputation: 531708

You can use set -f to disable filename expansion altogether.

$ str="* 'e f g' hij"
$ ( set -f; eval "set -- $str"; echo $2 )
e f g

This addresses just one problem you might anticipate with eval, but there may be other options available with set you can explore.

Upvotes: 2

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