shell fails on solaris 5.8 but works on 2.6 1

[art15t]

Has anyone experienced problems with shells failing on sol8 when the script passes space separated strings as an argument to a command? The script works fine on Sol2.6

e.g.

# get user description

while [ -z "$COMMENT" ]
do
read -r COMMENT?"Please enter a comment to identify this user > "
done

# if we entered "joe bloggs" as the info and then we do something like....

/usr/sbin/useradd -g other -d /export/home/$LOGIN -s /bin/ksh -c "$COMMENT" -m $LOGIN

The script fails because the comment was not wrapped in quotes but if when I'm prompted for the comment I place the comment inside quotes then it works ok.

I've tried various combinations on wrapping the comment inside the script but it fails on every occasion.

Anyone have a simple answer to this, i think the only thing i haven't tried is echo'ing the string on the command line....will that work?

ART

 

[SamBones]

Try putting a...
[tt]
unset IFS
[/tt]
...just before the [tt]read[/tt]. [tt]IFS[/tt] defines the Inter-Field Separator character. If it's set to a space, then entering "joe bloggs" is actually TWO entries to the read, not one.

Hope this helps!

 

[bpinos]

You should be able to place the escape character \ before the quotes when you call it. The line should look like this:

/usr/sbin/useradd -g other -d /export/home/$LOGIN -s /bin/ksh -c \"$COMMENT\" -m $LOGIN

Hope this helps out!

 

[art15t]

Thankyou people!

My apologies for not getting back sooner but sambones sorted it with "unset IFS". IFS was set to newline and when the command was executed it got separated into 2 or 3 separate commands which of course were not recognised by the shell.

Thanks once again!