How can I forward bash/zsh arguments to another shell

Question

I'm working on a system with a lot of tcsh configuration scripts, requiring me to run most programs through tcsh. I've attempted to make this easy for myself by adding this to my ~/.zshrc:

# run command in tcsh
function t() {
    tcsh -c "$@"
}

This works for something like t ls, but fails for t ls -l, which gives the error Unknown option: `-l' Usage: tcsh ..., and is clearly passing -l as an argument to tcsh, not to ls.

How can I quote the string passed in $@?

score 5 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 11 '12 at 18:50

5

Zsh has a special option for this (not bash): ${(q)}:

tcsh -c "${(j. .)${(q)@}}"

. First (${(q)@}) escapes all characters in the $@ array items that have special meaning, second (${(j. .)…}) joins the array into one string.

answered Dec 11 '12 at 18:50

ZyX

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Francisco · Answer 2 · 2013-01-08T12:37:46.830

2

This seems to work

function t {
  tcsh -c "$*"
}

and is a whole lot shorter than what you found in the other answer ;-)

[edit:]

ok, if you really want to get perverse with quotes... give up the function and just use an alias (which is probably a better idea anyway)

alias t='tcsh -c'

[edit2:] Here is a good and to the point discussion of the different ways to quote parameters in Zsh http://zshwiki.org/home/scripting/args

edited Jan 08 '13 at 12:37

answered Dec 11 '12 at 10:57

Francisco

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Thanks! What does `$*` do that `$@` doesn't? – Eric Dec 11 '12 at 10:59
Nevermind, [this](http://stackoverflow.com/a/3990540/102441) answered my question. – Eric Dec 11 '12 at 11:05
Does this work properly even for arguments containing spaces? e.g. `t ls -l "ab cd"`? – anishsane Dec 11 '12 at 11:35

score 0 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 10:26

0

This answer had what I needed:

# run command in tcsh
function t() {
    C=''
    for i in "$@"; do
        C="$C \"${i//\"/\\\"}\""
    done;
    tcsh -c "$C"
}

edited May 23 '17 at 10:26

Community

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answered Dec 11 '12 at 10:56

Eric

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How can I forward bash/zsh arguments to another shell

3 Answers3