[PLUG] 'date' output cli/bash inconsistency

[Felix Lee]

"Steven Raymond" <stever at woo-hoo.com>:
> > Echo strips out extra spaces, enclose the variable in quotes
> > echo "$TODAY"
> You're right!  Thank you.  So I checked "man echo" and "info echo" and
> neither mentioned this fact.  Is there some oft-found reason that would
> make it obvious that the quotes are needed?

It's not echo doing that, it's the shell.  When you do a
$-substitution, the substitution gets word-split, unless it's
enclosed in quotes.

So the shell splits $TODAY into words, losing all the spaces.  It
passes the words to echo as separate args, then echo pastes them
back together again, putting a single space between the words.

Since most of the time I don't want word-splitting, I make it a
habit to use quotes around $-substitutions even when it isn't
strictly necessary.  That makes it clear (to me at least) when
word-splitting is the desired effect, such as
    files="a b c"
    out="x"
    cat $files > "$out"
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