"The double quotes are of course technically correct, but when ... it's overkill and makes everyrthing ugly." The only way you know this is being a person who

"The double quotes are of course technically correct, but when ... it's overkill and makes everyrthing ugly." The only way you know this is being a person who routinely writes shell scripts. There is no substitute for knowing what you're doing. Try running shellcheck on configure scripts. Or try this curl -4O https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-release-8/src/build.sh shellcheck build.sh Or try shellcheck on the build.sh from buildroot.org. These scripts are "safe" enough for hundreds or thousands of competent users to be running them every day.