Re: [Help-bash] How to protect > and interpret it later on? (w/o using eval)

[Greg Wooledge]

On Fri, Dec 02, 2011 at 08:26:28AM -0600, Peng Yu wrote:
> When I call,
> 
> execute.sh ls > /tmp/tmp.txt
> 
> I want it actually to do
> 
> echo "ls > /tmp/tmp.txt"
> ls > /tmp/tmp.txt

That is impossible.  The redirection, being unquoted, is performed by the
shell where you are actually typing that.  If you want the > symbol to
be passed to the script as (part of) an argument, then it must be quoted,
as in your second example:

> execute.sh "ls > /tmp/tmp.txt"

THAT will work.  But why are you writing a script to read a shell command
and then execute it?  There is already a program that reads shell commands
and then executes them.  It's called bash.