My problem is not simple passing parameters with spaces (I know how to achieve that), consider more complicated case:
function build() {
make CC="$1" CFLAGS="$2" $* # $* is not correct here!
}
build gcc "XXX" VAR1="a b" VAR2="c=A d=B" LDFLAGS="-L/opt/lib -lm"
as equivalent to
make CC=gcc CFLAGS=XXX VAR1="a b" VAR2="c=A d=B" LDFLAGS="-L/opt/lib -lm"
I would like to achieve this one to work in shell (portable solutions please, no bashisms, etc). Any suggestions, recommendations?
There are two elements to a better solution:
shiftDefine the function using shift, like this:
function build {
local cc="$1"
local cflags="$2"
shift 2
make CC="$cc" CFLAGS="$cflags" "$@"
}
where we save the first two parameters to local variables, then shift the whole argument array by two; also, quote the "$@" expansion.
Then, call it with extra quoting, like this:
build gcc "XXX" 'VAR1="a b" VAR2="c=A d=B"' 'LDFLAGS="-L/opt/lib -lm"'
where the single quotes protect the extra arguments into the function; otherwise, the shell removes the quotes and you'd be left with VAR2=c=A d=B (unquoted) in the function.
"$@", not "$*".
"$@") like VAR2='"c=A d=B"'. I will check a bit later today and mark answer. Btw, shouldn't your example contain couple more single quotes?
"c=A d=B" instead of c=A d=B in the internals of Makefile, for now it still works when I dropped double quotes in the quoting, i.e. 'VAR2=c=A d=B'.
"$@"which is designed exactly for this purpose?$*and remember"$@"instead."$@"is very often useful whereas"$*"is very rarely useful and the unquoted forms are even rarer.