Re: [tlug] Rsync exclusion question

[John Fremlin <john@example.com>]

Josh Glover wrote:
> Of course one *should* understand the basics of interpolation in any
> language one uses. But the Best Practice is about avoiding
> interpolation altogether unless you *know* you want it in a string,
> and then understanding the rules as they apply to that string.

How is interpolation relevant to the (alleged) difference between 
"*.leases" and '*.leases'?

> I've seen old Unix hands tripped up by shell interpolation many times.

It can lead to very serious bugs so I don't see how there are any 
excuses for being muddled up.

I've seen excellent C programmers mix up = and == but they at least had 
the decency to feel extremely embarrassed by it.

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Josh Glover writes:
>  > Me neither, but I think it has to do with how Doug is invoking his
>  > script.
>
> I find this is invariably because I (a) wrote a script or shell
> function for unit testing, and quotes are being stripped there, or (b)
> some command I thought was either a shell built-in or a real program
> was replaced by a shell script, usually by a distro trying to make
> something like the autofools more "user-friendly".

Excellent point.

> PARAMETERS
> [...]
>    Positional Parameters

What's this got to do with anything?

[...]

>    Special Parameters
>        The shell treats several parameters specially.  These
> parameters may  only  be
>        referenced; assignment to them is not allowed.
>        *      Expands  to  the  positional  parameters,  starting from
> one.  When the
>               expansion occurs within double quotes, it expands to a
> single word with
>               the value of each parameter separated by the first
> character of the IFS
>               special variable.  That is, "$*" is equivalent to
> "$1c$2c...", where  c
>               is  the  first  character  of the value of the IFS
> variable.  If IFS is
>               unset, the parameters are separated by spaces.  If  IFS
> is  null,  the
>               parameters are joined without intervening separators.
>
>
> But what Doug was doing shouldn't have triggered any magic with *, AFAICT.

Yes, because that part of the manpage is talking about $* and "$*" I think?