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From: root@lingua.cltr.uq.OZ.AU (Hulk Hogan)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell
Subject: Shell quoting problem. Passing a "?" parameter.
Summary: Need quoting help
Keywords: sh, quoting
Message-ID: <1991May10.062827.19863@lingua.cltr.uq.OZ.AU>
Date: 10 May 91 06:28:27 GMT
Distribution: comp
Organization: Centre for Language Teaching and Research, Uni of Queensland, AUSTRALIA.
Lines: 53

Hi,
	I have a fun menu-based shell for my naive users written in
shell script. I have a problem, in that I have to send in a ? character 
to a routine, but am having problems.

Some background. I have a function "do_menu" displays a menu, gets a choice
and then runs that choice. It takes the items on the menu, and the programs
to run as arguments. Some of these programs have arguments, so that I use
double quotes to keep them together. 

One of these commands sends in a "?" character as the argument.  (It is
called by other menu selections with other characters as argument.)

An equivalent function to demonstrate my problem would be
% sh
$ dm()
{
$*
}

To demonstrate, I use the simple example of   dm "echo ?", which just
runs "echo ?".  However, I want to get a ? character printed out.
Not the results of explanding the meta-character ?, or the string '?' or
\? or whatever. Just the single character ?. Any ideas?
Here's what I've tried.

$ ls ?
1 	4
$ dm "echo ?"
1 4
$ dm 'echo ?'
1 4
$ dm "echo \?"
\?
$ dm 'echo \?'
\?
$ dm "echo '?'"
'?'
$ dm 'echo "?"'
"?"
$

If it's any help, I'm on a SPARC running SunOS 4.0.3.  Is this yet another
fixed-in-4.1 sun bug???

/\ndy
-- 
Andrew M. Jones,  Systems Programmer, 	Internet: andy@lingua.cltr.uq.oz.au
Centre for Lang. Teaching & Research, 	UUCP: uunet!lingua.cltr.uq.oz.au!andy
University of Queensland,  St. Lucia, 	Phone: +61  7 365 6915 (Use 07 in Oz)
Brisbane,  Qld. AUSTRALIA  4072    	Fax: +61 7 365 7077    IRC: HulkHogan

"No matter what hits the fan, it's never distributed evenly....."