Re: Avoiding the zshells intelligence...in one case

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 24 Jan 2017, Ray Andrews wrote:

> Sure, but if we have any chains -- one command calling another -- we end
> up loosing the quotes as things are passed along.

That's not true UNLESS you've either used a poorly constructed alias (which
is not really "one command calling another") or you have explicitly removed
quoting with "eval" or a parameter expansion flag.  Once a word is properly
quoted inside a parameter value, even a positional parameter, it remains
properly quoted until you mess with it somehow (which might include having
SH_WORD_SPLIT set, but that's why that's not set by default).

> > an ampersand; & isn't an expansion, just other shell syntax
>
> And that's just what I'm saying -- it would be nice to have some sort of
> bomb-proof zero expansion ability.

You're missing the point.  You can't "bomb-proof" syntactic tokens like
"&" without fundamentally changing the language.  It's like asking a C
compiler not to recognize semicolons.