From: Junio C Hamano Date: Mon, 27 Feb 2012 18:55:28 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/2] CodingGuidelines: Add a note about spaces after redirection Message-ID: <7vy5ro85sv.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org> In-Reply-To: <1330117921-8257-1-git-send-email-tim.henigan@gmail.com> Tim Henigan writes: > + - 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.