often I do

EXCLUDE="--exclude /a --exclude /b"
program $EXCLUDE -- source dest

I was told again that eval is evil. But what if one of those to-be-excluded dirs contains a space? To test: when I do this:

touch a b c 'a b c'
file="-l a b c 'a b c'"
ls $file

I get:

ls: cannot access ‘a: No such file or directory
ls: cannot access c’: No such file or directory
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 0 2011-01-05 09:17 a
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 0 2011-01-05 09:17 b
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 0 2011-01-05 09:17 b
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 0 2011-01-05 09:17 c

When I do:

ls "$file"

Then:

ls: invalid option —

But when I do eval:


eval ls "$file":


I could define my excludes without the params and build it with a for loop, but in the end, I still have to include it in the command, so that doesn't make the problem go away. So, how do I do this?