CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bashbrace-expansion
123
123

Reputation: 11226

Change separator/delim in bash brace expansion

Premise

I realise this question already exists, but the solutions are not actually changing the delimiter. I would like to know if there is anyway to change the delimiter or if anybody knows where it resides.

Example

Say i need to pass this string to a program, delimited by commas as that is what the program accepts

echo \"abc" "{def,ghi}\"

prints

"abc def" "abc ghi"

where i would want

"abc def","abc ghi"

Obviously this is just a simple example though.

What i have tried

Nothing as i have no idea where to look for this delimiter, although i have searched pretty extensively

Also as a sub question:

Using choroba's answer from the other question creates errors when trying to use it to pass it to my script. Admittedly i haven't tried for long though

I tried

./script ( set abc" "{def,ghi} ; IFS=: ; echo "$*" )
./script < <( set abc" "{def,ghi} ; IFS=: ; echo "$*" )
./scipt $(( set abc" "{def,ghi} ; IFS=: ; echo "$*" ))

Upvotes: 5

Views: 3376

Answers (1)

RedX
RedX

Reputation: 15185

So my test script looks like:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

echo "$@"

And it works fine with:

./my_script.sh $(set \"abc\ {def,ghi}\"; IFS=,; echo "$*")

It outputs:

"abc def","abc ghi"

I guess you were missing the $ to invoke the subshell.

Updated for main question (whether there is an option to change the separator):

After looking into bash v4.3 source:

When doing

./my_script.sh \"abc\ {1,2}\"

there is no way of adding any other separator because there is no separator. The command gets two arguments passed to it "abc 1" and "abc 2".

The case of

echo \"abc\ {1,2}\"

You would need to expand the built-in echo to have either an option or global variable to set the words separator. Currently this is done by putchar(' ') in echo_builtin in builtins/echo.def:192

Upvotes: 6

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