turn off globbing within script

[lackawaxen]

Hi, all.

I am trying to write a ksh script that accepts an SQL query from the user like this:

script_name select * from schema.table;

When the script runs, the user will be prompted for a password to the database and then the query will run and return results. The problem is, the wildcard is returning a list of all the filenames in my current directory. Therefore, I need to turn off globbing.

I have found advice on the internet but none that apply to me. First, I need to turn off globbing within my script so I cannot use "set -f". Also, I cannot expect the user to input the * as '*'. Is there a way to accept a query normally as I have above? Here's my code:

if [ -n "$*" ]; then
  QUERY="$*"
fi

mysql -usystem -p$password -e "$QUERY"

I have tried the following and none of them work:

'$QUERY' => $QUERY
'"$QUERY"' => "$QUERY"
"$QUERY" => glob
"'$QUERY'" => glob
$QUERY => glob

Thanks for your help.

[lackawaxen]

I made a mistake, actually. I meant to say that I cannot user "set -o noglob" since I'm doing this in ksh.

[vsemaska]

The problem is the shell environment is expanding the * before running the script. So there's nothing you can do in the script to get that *. The only solution I see is have the script prompt the user for the SQL query instead having the user pass it as a paramter list.

[lackawaxen]

Thanks for your help. I might go with that or with forcing the user to put the query in single quotes after all.

if [ -n "$*" ]; then
  QUERY="$*;"
fi

mysql -u user_name -p$password -e "$QUERY"

script_name 'select * from schema.table'