Yes that was a typo (too late to fix it, oops) BTW, the fact that shell splits and echo joins is VERY confusing to a beginner. For example: mystr='a b c'

Yes that was a typo (too late to fix it, oops) BTW, the fact that shell splits and echo joins is VERY confusing to a beginner. For example: mystr='a b c' # two spaces between each $ echo $mystr a b c # why is there only one space? I think this was "feature" during the times when it was OK to write C code like: char line[100]; // truncates lines longer than 100 chars But it's no longer OK! Filenames contain spaces, etc.