[anyk3y]

when I pass command line arguments to my script that contains multiple options to a function that uses a getopts function, it will work fine if you have the optargs in quotes like (-a "arg1 arg2"), but if i am reading the command line args from a txt file, and try to pass them to the function, it doesn't see whats in the quotes as one $optarg it sees: ' "arg1 ' and ' arg2" '. any ideas on how to get around this?

[scm]

If you show us how you're attempting pass the arguments to the function, we'll show you how to quote them properly. How are you representing the multi-word arguments in the text file?

[anyk3y]

if i pass these lines in via command line argument by themselves they work fine, the txt file im reading each line from is as follows, and if i put quotes around $line, it reads the whole thing in and doesnt parse it for the case statement, but without quotes around $line, it works but the ones in quotes arent kept together.

-S S1 -N N1 -c C1 -s S1 -a R -j "-Twenty -One"
-S S2 -N N2 -c C2 -s S2 -a R2 -j "-Twenty -Two"
-S S3 -N N3 -c C3 -s S3 -a R3 -j "-Twenty -Three"

[anyk3y]

There seems to be some sort of a problem with the quotes. The quotes behave differently when received from the commandline as opposed to when I read them from a txt file using a { while read -r line; do..... done < txtfile.txt }. I need them to be read as they are from the command line. because getopts uses quotes and spaces (i.e. "-arg1 -arg2") to view as one option.

so as in the above txt file when getopts goes to the -j option, it should see "-Twenty -One" as one argument for that option. But instead it sees it as -T option w option... -O option.. and throws exception.

[vsemaska]

Try using the eval command:

eval getopts $line

[anyk3y]

you are genious. Thanks alot!