3 ms·

Nobody used it with the quotes. The point was to get rid of the quotes. [ x$var = xval ]

• PhilipRoman 2y ago
  It does nothing to help with quoting, if $var is broken then so is x$var. About half the usages I've found (and this is some pretty old code) quote the variables correctly.
  • hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
    The assumption for this use was var was a valid single word but could conflict with switches to [ / test or it could be the empty string. If var was already guaranteed to be [^[:space:][:punct:][:cntrl:]]+, then x would also have been unnecessary too.
• throwaway314155 2y ago
  This is discussed in the article.
  • rurban 2y ago
    Not at all. And even our autotools are still full of x-hacks without double quotes. He completely missed the point of the x-hack. Which obviously fails with spaces.
• chasil 2y ago
  If we have set var='hello world' then the syntax breaks.