Re: [PATCH 1/2] CodingGuidelines: Add a note about spaces after redirection

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Feb 27, 2012, 18:55 UTC
Message-ID: <7vy5ro85sv.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <1330117921-8257-1-git-send-email-tim.henigan@gmail.com>

Tim Henigan <tim.henigan@gmail.com> writes:

Show 5 quoted lines

> + - Redirection operators should be written with space before, but
> +   no space after them.  For example:
> +      'echo test >$file'  is preferred over
> +      'echo test > $file'
> +

If you are using a $file placeholder, then we would need to show readers that they need to be enclosed in dq to prevent some versions of bash from giving us a false warning, and explicitly say why.

  $ bash
  bash$ file='/var/tmp/f i l e'
  bash$ >$file
  bash: $file: ambiguous redirect
  bash$ >"$file"
  bash$ ls -1 "$file"
  /var/tmp/f i l e

Adding something like this after your two line examples, after updating them to use "$file" instead, should be sufficient:

	Note that even though it is not required by POSIX to double quote
	the redirection target in a variable like the above example, our
	code does so because some versions of bash issue an warning unless
	we do.