Splitting parameter list

Question

I want to create a bash function that will accept variable number of parameters. There must be at least one parameter. Then I call another program and need to insert fixed values between the first parameter accepted and the rest of parameters.

I do it based on this answer

tt() {
  name="$1"
  params="${@:2}"
  someapp ${name} 1234 /some/path "${params}"
}

But it doesn't work as intended as if I call it

tt John has fun

the resulting call will be

someapp John 1234 /some/path 'has fun' 

note quotes, while I need the result to be

someapp John 1234 /some/path has fun 

with two last args not in common quotes.

Answer 1

Pick out the first argument, shift, then call your other command with the saved 1st argument, and the remaining ones:

tt () {
   name=$1
   shift

   someapp "$name" 1234 /some/path "$@"
}

Alternatively, with a named array like what you attempted:

tt () {
    name=$1
    params=( "${@:2}" )

    someapp "$name" 1234 /some/path "${params[@]}"
}

The main issue with your own code is that you are not creating or using the params variable as an array. Doing that correctly would look like params=( "${@:2}" ) followed by using at as "${params[@]}", including the double quotes and the [@] bit.

Array assignments always look like name=( ... ), so what you get with params="${@:2}" is not an array but a single string consisting of the 2rd element onward from "$@", concatenated with spaces as delimiters.

Without the double quotes in "${params[@]}", the shell would split each element of the array on spaces, tabs, and newlines (the characters in $IFS by default), and then apply filename globbing on each generated word. Without [@], you only get the first element of the array.

---

A minimalistic rewrite:

tt () { someapp "$1" 1234 /some/path "${@:2}"; }