Running stored command with environment variables - sh

Question

This works in sh:
$ export command="true"
$ "$command"
If I need to pass some variable to the command, however, I can't get it to work:
$ export command="env FOO=\"bar\" true"
$ "$command"
sh: 2: env FOO="bar" true: not found
What is missing?

Answer 1

Since you've put $command in quotes this prevents the shell from performing field splitting on it's contents, it's treated as one single word. Thus the name of the of command it tries to run is the full contents of $command including it's spaces and double quote characters.
You could omit the quotes and this almost does what you want:
export command="env FOO=\"bar\" true"
$command
Except this will set FOO to "bar" (with the double quotes) and not bar (without the quotes) as you probably expected. It also won't work if you try to set FOO to something with a space in it:
$ command="env FOO=\"bar foo\" true"
$ $command
env: foo": No such file or directory
The problem here being that double quote characters in the variable command are treated like any other character after being substituted. They aren't removed nor do they prevent field splitting.
What you can do instead is use the eval command:
command="env FOO=\"bar foo\" true"
eval "$command"
This causes the shell to completely re-evaluate everything after eval again and execute as a command. In other words after it does substitution, splitting, expansion, and quote removal on eval "$command" it then does substitution, splitting and expansion and quote removal on env FOO="bar foo" true as if it were the command entered into the shell.
However the eval command is very dangerous. You have to trust everything you pass to it. If you pass something that came from an untrusted user than the user can craft a string that will let him run any command he wants.
As an alternative to eval you can use either alias or a function. The alias command is just as dangerous as eval, but if you're only going to be using $command in from the command prompt and never from scripts then using an alias is the easiest and simplest solution:
$ alias mycommand="env FOO=\"bar\" true"
$ mycommand
If you're using it in shell scripts or both from the command line and in shell scripts I would use a function:
myfunc() {
env FOO="bar" true
}
myfunc
As an aside you don't actually need to use env to set an environment variable for a command when using one of the Bourne shells, you can just set the variable:
FOO="bar" true
When used like this the variable assignment works like with the env command, it doesn't change the value of FOO in the shell's environment, only in the true command's environment.