On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 6:10 PM, erik quanstrom <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> this is a very odd case > > > > odd but important. it's worth knowing that > > what's your reasoning that this is an important case?
i think it's important because every time you put echo $foo in a shell script, you're opening yourself to unexpected behaviour should the first member of $foo happen to become -n at some time. the possibility of a security hole via this mechanism is small but present (try grep 'echo[ ]+\$' /rc/bin/*) one can always do: echo -n $"foo^' ' i suppose, but i doubt that anyone ever will. mind you, it's a lot better than interpreting backslash escapes a la sys v echo.
