| From: Seneca Cunningham via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | You were a touch sloppy with your quoting. Rules for quoting in bash (or any language with macro semantics) are hard. Quoting doesn't seem to be natural for humans. Without quotes, data can bleed into code. When I'm writing a bash script, I try to quote every macro use except for those that must not be quoted. The reason: without quoting, the use will probably break if there is a space (or other odd thing) in the value but "normal" testing rarely uncovers this. UNIX/Linux folks don't think that spaces belong in pathnames but GUIs and the OS don't agree. Repeat advice: - use "set -u" to turn references to undefined macros (spelling errors) into bash errors - use "set -e" so that a shell script stops when a command returns an error value that the script tacitly ignores. bash scripts are easy to get wrong. I've found that these habits expose or prevent a significant number of mistakes. They also remove these issues from consideration when you are trying to puzzle out some bash problem.