setting IFS to ignore pattern

eRJe · 03-11-2010, 05:17 PM

Hi there,

I'm working on a backup script which takes the following input:

Code:

RevBackup.sh <options> <source> <target>

The problem I'm having is that the source and target might contain spaces in the path. ie. /home/eRJe/My\ Documents

I would like the script to ignore "\ " (backslash-space) as being a delimiter. how could I do this without stopping a normal space from being a delimiter?

I was hoping I could do this with IFS. But so far I have only found info about setting a delimiter and not to "ignore" one

Thanks for any input!

Robbert

tuxdev · 03-11-2010, 06:00 PM

This is almost certainly due to not correctly quoting expansions, using $* instead of "$@", or other related issues. What is the script?

eRJe · 03-12-2010, 03:29 AM

Well this is the code I'm using for reading the arguments. I actually copied this part from another script because I liked the way it handles a varying No. of arguments as input.

Code:

# Reading arguments
unset IFS
for arg in $*; do
  ARGNAME="$(echo "$arg" |cut -d= -f1)"
  ARGVAL="$(echo "$arg" |cut -d= -f2)"
    
  if ! echo "$ARGNAME" |grep -q '^-'; then
    if [ -z "$SOURCE_PATH" ]; then
       SOURCE_PATH="$ARGVAL"
    else
       if [ -z "$TARGET_PATH" ]; then
          TARGET_PATH="$ARGVAL"
       else
          echo "Too many arguments"
          show_help;
          exit 1
       fi
    fi
 #

I wasn't aware of the $@. If I understood it well enough, changing the $* to "$@" should do the trick. I'll check it out when I'm back at home again.

Thanks for pointing me to this. I've been searching my ass off trying all sort of options with IFS, awk.

Robbert

grail · 03-12-2010, 04:20 AM

Hi Robert

You might also want to look at getopts for parsing your options:

http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/internal.html#EX33