Bash Quick Start Guide

When you don't want quotes

The previous section might have led you to ask, What about if I actually do want the contents of my variable to undergo whitespace splitting and glob expansion?

You may be tempted to do this to store a set of options for repeated use in later commands, for example:

# Not recommended
curlopts='--location --cookie-jar ~/cookies --cookie ~/cookies'
curl $curlopts --head -- http://www.example.org/
curl $curlopts -- http://www.example.net/

If we double-quoted the $curlopts expansions here, the options would be treated together as one argument, and wouldn't work correctly. However, this still seems to be a useful property of variables—so how can we use it safely?

The answer is that this is an ideal application of the ...