Consider the following script ...

#!/bin/bash
i="one two three.wav"
ls -l "${i}"
out_linetext="ls -l \"${i}\""
echo "generated stmt ... [$out_linetext]"
$out_linetext

when this is run, the results are ...

/home/user> xls
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 5365804 2008-01-26 09:40 one two three.wav
generated stmt ... [ls -l "one two three.wav"]
ls: "one: No such file or directory
ls: two: No such file or directory
ls: three.wav": No such file or directory
/home/user>

note that "ls" is run twice.

The first time ...

ls -l "${i}"

it works with no problem.

The second time, I simply constructed the entire statement
and stored it into a variable and then attempted to "run"
what was in that variable ...

$out_linetext

and that's when the errors occurred.
you can see from the echo of the value of $out_linetext
that the statement was constructed with the correct syntax.

So why did it work the first time but not the second time?

wylbur37 wrote:

> Consider the following script ...
>
> #!/bin/bash
> i="one two three.wav"
> ls -l "${i}"
> out_linetext="ls -l \"${i}\""
> echo "generated stmt ... [$out_linetext]"
> $out_linetext

i="one two three.wav"
ls -l "${i}"

The above command looks for a file named 'one two three.wav' (which is a
legal file name). If you have such a file in the current directory (which I
suppose is the case since you get no errors), the command succeeds.

out_linetext="ls -l \"${i}\""

After this command, the variable out_linetext contains exactly the
following:

ls -l "one two three.wav"

If you try to run this as a command, the shell does not re-evaluate the
command and treats '"one', 'two' and 'three.wav"' as three different file
names (all legal) and does not find them.
What you really want is probably

eval "$out_linetext"

On Mar 20, 10:30*am, pk <p...@pk.pk> wrote:
> What you really want is probably
> eval "$out_linetext"

Yes, using "eval" did the trick.
Thanks very much!