Read space as input in shell script

Question

How can i give space " " as input in shell script ?

Ex :

echo " Enter date for grep... Ex: Oct  6 [***Double space is important for single date***] (or) Oct 12 "
read mdate 
echo $mdate

In this i get output as "Oct 6" But i want "Oct  6"

How can i do it ?

Answer 1

You already have Oct  6 in $mdate, your problem is that you're expanding it when printing. Always use double quotes around variable substitutions:

read -r mdate
echo "$mdate"

The -r (raw) option to read tells it not to treat backslashes specially, which is what you want most of the time (but it's not the problem here).