ZFS vs OSX Time Machine

[John Baldwin]

On Thursday, April 28, 2011 5:59:54 pm Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> I've seen cases where entries in /boot/loader.conf throw parser errors
> during loader(8) when quotes aren't used.  The man page denotes that
> quotes are required, which doesn't appear to be true?  Possibly the
> parser only throws errors if non-numeric/non-integer values (e.g.
> strings) are specified without quotes.
> 
> It's interesting that in the BUGS section of the man page the syntax
> shown for hw.ata.ata_dma=0 also ""violates"" the ""required"" syntax.

Yes, it's confusing.  My gut instinct is that quotes are only required
if the value contains whitespace.  I've certainly used
'autoboot_delay=NO' without quotes before.

I just did some tests and it looks like quotes are only required for
values that contain whitespace, so

foo=bar
bar=42G
baz="foo bar"

are fine, but

baz=foo bar

will fail.

This is similar to normal shell syntax for assigning to variables.

-- 
John Baldwin