ksh: How to pass arguments containing white space between scripts? - shell

Question

I have two scripts (one ksh and other Perl) and one calls the other. I have to handle a scenario when someone accidentally enters a white space in file name and report it as an error (only when the file does not exist). It looks like p.sh which uses $* to pass/forward all arguments to p.pl doesn't handle quoted arguments the way they should be? Any ideas how to fix this? Let's just say one could enter multiple spaces in the filename too.
p.sh:
#!/usr/bin/env ksh
/tmp/p.pl $* 1>/tmp/chk.out 2>&1
print "Script exited with value $?"
print "P.PL OUTPUT:"
cat /tmp/chk.out
exit 0
p.pl:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use Getopt::Std;
getopts ("i:", \ %options);
if ($options{i} && -e $options{i}) {
print "File $options{i} Exists!\n";
}
else {
print "File $options{i} DOES NOT exist!\n";
}
Test cases (when there is an actual file '/tmp/a b.txt' (with a space in it) on the system):
[test] /tmp $ p.pl -i /tmp/a b.txt
File /tmp/a DOES NOT exist!
[test] /tmp $ p.pl -i "/tmp/a b.txt"
File /tmp/a b.txt Exists!
[test] /tmp $ ./p.sh -i "/tmp/a b.txt"
Script exited with value 0
P.PL Check OUTPUT:
File /tmp/a DOES NOT exist!
[test] /tmp $ ./p.sh -i "/tmp/ a b.txt"
Script exited with value 0
P.PL Check OUTPUT:
File /tmp/ Exists!
It's the last two scenarios I'm trying to fix. Thank you.

Answer 1

To preserve whitespace that was passed into the script, use the $# parameter:
/tmp/p.pl "$#" 1>/tmp/chk.out 2>&1
The quotation marks are necessary to make sure that quoted whitespace is seen by p.pl.