Answer by Sonia Hamilton for What is the difference between $* and $@?

"$*" has few uses, the other answers cover why.

Here's a neat example of using "$*" to just "print everything" when doing error handling:

error () {  printf '%s\n'"$*"  exit 1}

This script demonstrates the difference:

% cat foo.sh #!/usr/bin/env basherror1 () {  printf '%s\n'"$*"  #exit 1}error2 () {  printf '%s\n'"$@"  #exit 1}error1 "aa" "bb"echo "---"error2 "aa" "bb"

% ./foo.sh  aa bb---aabb