Re: shell quoting (was: Improving the performance of system boot by eliding unused rc.d scripts and caching the result)

On Wed, Aug 19, 2026 at 11:17:45AM +0200, Edgar Fu? wrote:
 > > like "for f in ${allf}" where the ${allf} value needs to be field split 
 > > - that's not really safe, but the alternative is messy.
 >
 > Why is that unsafe? What else could one do?

Suppose you have:

   allf=$(ls *.jpg)
   for f in $allf; do
       printf 'File: %s\n' "$f"
   done

Now imagine that the files in $CWD are foo.jpg, bar.jpg, and silly
filename with spaces.jpg...

There is no easy way to make it more robust, unfortunately.

-- 
David A. Holland
[email protected]