What does the following from https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/154290/674 mean?
In general, in shells other than zsh, $PATH outside double quotes breaks when the value contains spaces or other special characters, but in an assignment, it's safe
Could you give some example? Thanks.
Variables in simple assignments (e.g. a=$b) are by definition (i.e., POSIX specification), not usually necessary to quote -- in most cases, anyway. That is because in these assignments, the "string-splitting" and "globbing" (i.e., white-space and wildcards like *) are not expanded.
In other cases, other than assignments, the variable (echo $b) is expanded -- including whitespaces (string-splitting) -- and hence should be quoted (echo "$b"), to prevent problems, in case it contains whitespace. E.g., consider if I'm not using echo as an example, but instead another command: cmd $b is going to receive multiple args if there are spaces in $b, but cmd "$b" will receive one argument, even if it has spaces.
