[olug] bash script help

[Nick Walter]

I had to make two changes to your script to make it work on my system
(Red Hat 8.0, bash 2.05b)

First, I changed 

let idx=$#-1 

to

let idx=$#

and also changed

set "${@:0:$idx} new-value"

to

set "\"${@:0:$idx}\" new-value"

leaving the whole script as:

let idx=$#
set "\"${@:0:$idx}\" new-value"
echo "$@"


--capture--

[ii120:~]# ./test.sh foo bar widget
"foo bar" new-value
[ii120:~]#

--capture--



Nick Walter



On Thu, 2002-10-03 at 13:58, William E. Kempf wrote:
> I've got a bit of a complex bash script problem.  I need to change the value
> of the last positional argument passed to the script, in order to pass the
> arguments on to another script/program.  Here's my first (naive) attempt:
> 
> # script "test"
> let idx=$#-1
> set "${@:0:$idx} new-value"
> echo "$@"
> 
> The problem with this is in quoting (which often makes my head hurt).
> Here's a sample usage that works:
> 
> $test foo bar widget
> foo bar new-value
> 
> However, this usage doesn't work correctly:
> 
> $test "foo bar" widget
> foo bar new-value
> 
> What I need would be this output instead:
> 
> "foo bar" new-value
> 
> Anyone know of a way to achieve this?  I suppose I could take a brute force
> approach and loop through every argument appending them to a variable with
> quotes around it... but the extra quotes this would produce bug me a bit,
> and this seems like it would be an awfully slow way to do this.
> 
> Bill Kempf
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