Re: ed: please give me a little control over appending final newlines

[Paul Jarc]

"Andrew L. Moore" <address@hidden> wrote:
> In message <address@hidden>, Andreas Schwab writes:
>>|>     if [ ."$@" = . ]; then ed "$TMP"; else ed "$@" "$TMP"; fi
>>             ^^^^
>>This will expand to more than one word if $# > 1, probably giving a
>>syntax error from test.  The test is not nessary at all, just use the
>>else branch unconditionally.
>
> In the particular case of ed(1), "" is interpreted as an illegal file name.

I think any shell that expands "$@" to a single empty word instead of
no words when $# is zero will also fail to understand the $() syntax.


paul