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

[Edgar Fuß <ef%math.uni-bonn.de@localhost>]

As always, it gets interesing as soon as KRE comments on shell.

> 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?

> Though people still write quotes around simple words like in things like
> 	[ "${ans}" = "yes" ]
> The quotes in "${ans}" are needed, those around yes are silly.
Well, it looks more symmetric to the eye and even in
	foo="foo bar"
I find the quotes useful. At least for someone like me skipping between 
programming languages in one project (I always need to look up which one of 
sh/bmake/perl has elif/elsif/elseif).