[CentOS] bash off topic

Fri May 17 13:18:43 UTC 2019
Sean <smalder73 at gmail.com>

So others have commented about the particulars of bash and shell quotes, etc.

I wanted to suggest you take a look at ShellCheck [1,2] and BATS [3].
I have been doing syntax, lint, and acceptance testing for Puppet code
for about a year...and love it... but I recently came across these and
have been working to apply the same principles to my shell script
projects.  The sheer number of fringe bugs in my script that using
shellcheck has lead me to clean up has been amazing.  BATS is more
complicated, but the principle is that you write tests that can assert
that your script is working or not.  So I made a project just to play
with this stuff, if you want to check it out [4].

[1] http://shellcheck.net
[2] https://github.com/koalaman/shellcheck
[3] https://github.com/bats-core/bats-core
[4] https://gitlab.com/salderma/bash-spec-test

--Sean


>
> From: Jerry Geis <jerry.geis at gmail.com>
> To: CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org>
> Cc:
> Bcc:
> Date: Thu, 16 May 2019 12:57:43 -0400
> Subject: [CentOS] bash off topic
> I have a simple bash script it will take arguments from a file that has
> quotes.
>
> my file arg.txt would be this
> -lt "*.txt"
>
> my script file would be
> LS_ARG=`cat arg.txt`
> ls $LS_ARG
>
> it does not run properly:
>  sh -x ./arg.sh
> ++ cat arg.txt
> + LS_ARG='-lt "*.txt"'
> + ls -lt '"*.txt"'
> ls: cannot access "*.txt": No such file or directory
>
>
> How do I resolve that ?  If the quotes are not in my file it all works
> fine. I think its because it looks like the extra single quotes it puts
> around the "*.txt" - or - '"*.txt"'  - how do I do this ?  This is just a
> short example of my larger need.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Jerry
>
>