View source for Word Splitting

I was about ready to pull my hair out today when I couldn't figure out why my startup script wasn't letting me pass options to Java in cygwin.

Here's what I was trying to do:

<geshi lang="bash">
JAVA_CMD="$JAVA_HOME/bin/java"
export JAVA_HOME
JAVA_OPTS="-ea -server"
export JAVA_OPTS

# ...

"$JAVA_CMD" ${JAVA_OPTS} -Dbash=fun com.MyClass
</geshi>

Whenever I would start my script, I would get this error:
<geshi lang="bash">
Unrecognized option: -ea -server
Could not create the Java virtual machine.
</geshi>

If I changed JAVA_OPTS to only "-ea" or "-server" it worked fine.  I tried every combination of quoting my command, and I could not get it to work.  I thought I was going crazy, because I've used this pattern in a dozen or so scripts, and the default JBoss script uses the same.  Then, I found the section of the [http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html#SEC33 Bash manual] on word splitting.    I did a quick grep, and found sure enough, someone thought to change this inside the script.

<geshi>
# Unset Intercommand separator
IFS=
export IFS
</geshi>

This apparently was someone else's workaround, so they didn't have to quote <code>"$JAVA_CMD"</code> and any options with spaces in them.

[[Category:Cygwin]]
[[Category:Bash]]