Re: weird behaviour of quotes in dash variable assignments
On Mon, Sep 21, 2020 at 12:34:20PM -0400, Gary Dale wrote:
> As an FYI, the scripts were the same on both servers because I had ssh
> sessions on both and copy/pasted the script from one to the other. (cat
> <script> on server 1, then use Konsole's copy and paste to select and paste
> it into nano on server 2).
Copy and paste doesn't always preserve the actual contents of a file.
What you get depends on several factors, including the behavior of the
terminal emulator that you're copying from. Tabs may be converted to
spaces, and I have no idea what other changes may occur.
As a demonstration for myself, just now, I performed the following
experiment in both rxvt-unicode and xterm, on Debian 10:
1) Run the command: printf 'a\tb\n'
2) Run the command: hd
3) Highlight the line containing the output of the first command, and paste
it into the terminal, to be read by hd.
4) Press Ctrl-D.
On rxvt-unicode, I get this output:
00000000 61 09 62 0a |a.b.|
00000004
On xterm, I get this output:
00000000 61 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 62 0a |a b.|
0000000a
If your original script contained non-breaking spaces, or curly quotes,
or literal tabs, or who knows what else, then there's a nonzero chance
it will be altered by the copy/paste.
This is why you need to *verify* that the two scripts are the same, not
just assume that pasting did what you thought it did.
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