grep tries to read from a file instead of through pipe when passing function arguments with a space

Question

I'm trying to write a function that will find all processes by name and then let you send signals to them one by one. Here is the smallest part of code that I can't get to work correctly:

ps -ef | grep "$@"

If I used

ab cd

as the input to the function, I'd like it to generate

ps -ef | grep "ab cd"

but instead it generates

ps -ef | grep ab cd

which looks for 'ab' in the file 'cd'.

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:05

2

You want "$*", not "$@". This answer goes into details, but basically "$@" quotes each parameter individually, while "$*" quotes the whole mess. So, "$@" is equivalent to "ab" "cd"; "$*" is equivalent to "ab cd".

edited May 23 '17 at 12:05

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answered Jan 08 '15 at 02:14

Amadan

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Thank you. I tried so hard to search for the proper stack overflow response (I knew someone must have asked something like this before) but I couldn't find it. – AndrewLngdn Jan 08 '15 at 18:40

grep tries to read from a file instead of through pipe when passing function arguments with a space

1 Answers1