Re: inotifywait in bash script: space

[davidson <davidson@freevolt.org>]

On Sat, 2 Dec 2017, B.M. wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> not a Debian specific question, but I hope to get an answer here...
>
> I try to use inotifywait in a bash script to block until a file in a directory
> gets changed. Then the script should continue. That's working well unless the
> path I hand over to inotifywait contains spaces.
>
> I already tried to escape them like so:
>
>  MYCOMMAND = "inotifywait  -qqr -e create \"$MYDIR\""
>
> where MYDIR is something like "/tmp/test dir" but although echo shows the
> command correctly and putting the very same command in a shell just works, as
> part of my script it doesn't work. (I don't want to get paths back from
> inotifywait.)
>
> Thanks for any pointers towards clarification and help.

I don't know anything about inotifywait. Maybe that doesn't matter?

  $ foo="filename with spaces"
  $ echo content > "$foo"
  $ command=(cat "$foo")
  $ "${command[@]}"        # This will work:
  content
  $ ${command[@]}          # but do notice that this will not work:
  cat: filename: No such file or directory
  cat: with: No such file or directory
  cat: spaces: No such file or directory

> Best,
> Bernd