Accessing bash command line args $@ vs $*

Question

In many SO questions and bash tutorials I see that I can access command line args in bash scripts in two ways:

$ ~ >cat testargs.sh 
#!/bin/bash

echo \"y         


        

Answer 1

A nice handy overview table from the Bash Hackers Wiki:

where c in the third row is the first character of $IFS, the Internal Field Separator, a shell variable.

If the arguments are to be stored in a script variable and the arguments are expected to contain spaces, I wholeheartedly recommend employing a "$*" trick with the internal field separator $IFS set to tab.