Is quoting necessary in /etc/rc.conf ?

[Esa Karkkainen]

On Sun, Aug 06, 2017 at 11:00:03AM +0000, Manish Jain wrote:
> 
> Hi,

Hi,

> On my system, it works whether I put either of the following in rc.conf:
> 
> xyz_enable="YES"
> 
> Or,
> 
> xyz_enable=YES
> 

The "xyz_enable" shell environment variable is most likely checked by
checkyesno function, which is sourced from /etc/rc.subr file.

> Just wished to check whether an unquoted YES is completely equivalent 
> (and accepted) as a quoted YES ?

When the environment variables value does not contain certain
characters, like a space, then there is no functional difference
betwween a quoted YES and a nonquoted YES strings, in this case.

The shells use space as argument separator. Below is a simple shell
script that shows the number of arguments given to it.

$ cat demo.sh
#!/bin/sh
echo $#

There are five examples:

$ ./demo.sh "YES"
1

$ ./demo.sh YES
1

$ ./demo.sh "NO"
1

$ ./demo.sh NO
1

$ ./demo.sh "YES NO"
1

$ ./demo.sh YES NO
2

Esa

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