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  • Many thanks for your reply Chris, I shall give that a try. Can you explain why its best to avoid eval out of interest ? Commented Jan 18 at 19:01
  • @John the main reason is that it's way too easy to lose track of the nested quotation marks (or the escape characters) and end up with unquoted values that are then inadvertently evaluated/executed by the shell. See Why and when should eval use be avoided in shell scripts? and an answer to What is the "eval" command in bash? Commented Jan 19 at 17:45