Ok I lied. I understand why its not working but how should I workaround
it?
Do I have to have my script gather a list of the files and the pass it
the variable?
That sucks that I can not use a wildcard to just get all.
I have made these changes. Which I though would fix my problem.
string="My Documents/"
cp "${string}*" Which I thought would eliminate the problem. I guess I
am not understanding.
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of James Mohr
Sent: Monday, October 14, 2002 3:58 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Variable Quoting
On Monday 14 October 2002 20:38, Paul Kraus wrote:
<SNIP>
> Now with this change
> string="My Documents/*"
> cp "$string" /tmp
>
> cp: cannot stat 'My Documents/*':no such file or directory
Sure because the token that is passed to the cp command includes the
asterisk,
it doesn't know that it should expand the asterisk (*) to the file
names, so
it looks for a file with the literal name '*'.
> So then I for kicks I tried.
>
> cp "My Documents/*" /tmp
> Produces the same error.
Same thing.
>
> So just to make sure that it was not a typo in path I tried. cp My\
> Documents/* /tmp
>
> And this worked.
Makes sense as the shell is now expanding the asterisks to the names of
the
files. You don't see this because it is expanded internally. Create a
shell
script that just does this copy and put "set -x" on the first list. This
should show you the expanded form before it is passed to cp.
> So is the problem with cp? Since the same syntax seems to work with
> all other apps? Is cp not capable of taking a double quoted path with
> spaces?
No, it is the fact that cp does not know to expand the asterisk. Plus
you are
passing different things to the cp depending on what sets of quotes you
use.
> Redhat 7.3 in case it helps.
Actually the Linux distriubtion is pretty irrelevant in this case. In
fact the
behavior would be the same on most any *NIX system, as it is standard
shell
stuff.
See if these explain more of the details for you:
http://www.linux-tutorial.info/cgi-bin/display.pl?20&0&0&0&3
http://www.linux-tutorial.info/cgi-bin/display.pl?22&0&0&0&3
regards,
jimmo
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